The City

IN OL TOK THE advertisements battle in the three a.m. boulevards while the sleeping streets sweat and cry out in city heat.

In Ol Tok a head will hear the confession of your darkest sins, or pray for your deliverance, or answer the deepest questions of your soul; for a drop of raqi on its rooticles, or a couple of enns in its mouth which it will spit with wondrous skill into a saucer full of coins, or a kiss, or a small sexual favour.

In Ol Tok the city is at war with itself. New strong suburbs push up through old, long-grown, half-dead districts, sending out shoots and tendrils and rhizomes that are sewers and water pipes and conduits and ducts and power lines and telecomm channels, pushing the old boroughs—so ancient and massive with millennia of growth that the streets have been crushed down into tortuous alleyways (even crawlways) and the individual buildings fused into ossified hives of warped biotecture—cell by cell, centimetre by centimetre, into the river.

In Ol Tok nostalgia rises like cool mist from the river that is wider than the heart can see, a mist that runs like silver thread through the street cafés and bars and restaurants and when you ask your waiter or chanteuse: what is it, he or she will say, do you not recognise it? It is your soul.

In Ol Tok demons stalk the night; very small demons, discarded domestic organicals, stray organs, lost or abandoned toys or plasmballs, all fused together into elegantly obscene hybrids, seeking heat, seeking blood, seeking completion, seeking new hosts, seeking new elements to incorporate into themselves.

In Ol Tok there are too many vehicles for the streets (the streets are constantly redefining themselves as new buildings spring up and push their old out of their way) so that conveyances mechanical/organical/human-powered with licence plates ending in even numbers and those ending in odd numbers are only allowed to drive on alternate days.

Once ten thousand thousand angels watched over Ol Tok. In the heat of high summer, in the stale airless streets, people would look up at the sudden touch of a cool river breeze on their faces and say ten thousand thousand beating wings. The angels have all been driven away by helicopters. There is never an hour of the day or the night when there is not a helicopter of the Emperor airborne above some part of the city watching, as the angels did before them, for the sin of human hearts. There is never a day when the clapping of blades, near or distant, does not form the constant rhythm of life.

Ol Tok is the open mouth of a dead beggar in the gutter of Keekorok Boulevard, stained green from eating organical flesh.

Ol Tok is fish and spices and breadapples grilling over radiant elements or pans of charcoal made from ancient, lignified houses.

Ol Tok is the song of the riverboats, out in the offing, inbound with cargoes of fabric, spices, organochemicals, consumer electronics.

Ol Tok is the smell of water deep and full, the smell that satisfies like no other because it is the smell of our deepest memories of our racial womb.

Ol Tok is ten thousand pilgrims slipping off their clothes to wash and pour the turd-ridden water of the river over their heads as the edge of the world passes beneath the sun.

Ol Tok is the woman who only exists from the breasts up plugged into a cartload of organical support systems clapping her hands for alms on the corner of Gandhatta Avenue.

Ol Tok is the transtellar merchants in their soft-running Imperial automobiles, whirring softly along the river-front corniche to meetings in floating restaurants or select cafés.

Ol Tok is five million bicycles.

Ol Tok is ten million radios playing at once.

Ol Tok is twelve million umbrellas.

Ol Tok is the cry of Jashar Cantor and his banging banging gong sounding out from ten thousand prayer towers, Ol Tok is a million prayer hats bobbing through the streets in a sudden spring downpour.

Ol Tok is roof gardens and dark, dank courtyards crammed with towering piles of shit digesters and reprocessors and biogas plants.

Ol Tok is the sprawling suburban villas set among their private terraces and orchards on the city’s celebrated forty hills.

Ol Tok is whole districts afloat upon the sacred waters, uncountable generations of water-craft fused together into one conterminous mass where a family’s proudest boast is that in twenty generations no member has ever set foot upon hard land.

Ol Tok is the song of the longshoreman in dawnlight, the neverending song, ten thousand years in singing.

Ol Tok is the fishergirls diving in the twilight from their bamboo perches, the shine of their skin as they burst wet and shouting from the waters with some deep-river fish on their hunting spear.

Ol Tok is the taste of a whore’s mouth behind the Proclaimer tombs along Rajjit Prospect and its invitation to die, with these gathered faithful, your own little, private death.

Ol Tok is the moonlit smoothness of the inner thigh in the warm lagoons on the terraces high upon the forty hills.

Ol Tok is a woman, and a girl, and a young boy dragging a travois made from plastic girders through the thronging streets. The woman is tall and upright but does not yet understand that Ol Tok cares nothing for her pride, will casually annihilate her into the anonymity of its freight of lives. Yet she leans into the webbing harness with a determination that leaves some impression upon the cyclists and jeepney drivers and wine peddlers and pilgrims and shoppers and transtellar bankers and fortune tellers and policepersons. For one moment, they think, what a proud woman.

The girl is likewise tall, sent shooting into uncomfortable prominence by the sudden thrust of hormones and desires. In her spirit she is stripped naked, flayed by the countryperson’s agoraphobic dread that every eye is on her, every head turned toward her, every mouth commenting upon her: Look at her, that girl, she is from the country, you know, you can tell, you can always tell, look at her, what is that she is carrying: a head? The fact that she is pretty in the way that is interesting rather than beautiful only compounds her crushing self-consciousness.

The boy is too young to understand pride but old enough to know humiliation. Bent almost double, he drags along under his enormous pack. The pack could be ten, twenty times as great and heavy, he would not care as long as it hid him entirely from the contempt of the pressing pressing people. He hates his Mother for the way she strides along so proud and upright, dragging the contemptible travois with its cargo of cheap things and few. He hates his sister for carrying so blatant and immodest an object as his Grandfather’s head. The curiosity of strangers is like thorns in his eyes. Someone will pay for this humiliation, he swears, some small day.

Mathembe had watched the axes fall; long axes, glittering in the light that fell into the plaza outside Timboroa station, on the ends of long, slender poles. Axes falling, and rising, smeared with green gore.

The ticket clerk had refused her Mother’s smartcard. No credit, she had said, this sexless toad of a woman, smelling of her own warm fat. Not drawn on the Chepsenyt genepool. Next please.

Once, her Mother would have argued. Argued until the end of the world. Once. Before the carriers had driven away leaving scratchmarks on the straight white road. Once. Before her spirit went into retreat.

But sometimes, when the spirit is in retreat, the mind is thrown into a remote, thoughtless capability to act and achieve with seemingly instantaneous intelligence. In the plaza outside the station, bustling with travellers and flower sellers and magazine vendors, she had ordered Hradu and Mathembe to unload the trux while she went to find a meat buyer.

The price was enough for three tickets on the night train. Hard class. No meals.

The trux had died halfway across the plaza. The meat buyers fetched a squad of men and with their poleaxes had cut it up, there, outside Timboroa station. The axes had risen and fallen in the noon light, lopping the organical into chunks of quivering synthetic flesh. Other men had loaded the meat onto a trailer. It would be taken away and broken down into cellular base from which new organicals might be made. The axes rose and fell, splitting the plastic carapace of the brainpan, cleaving the soft organic circuitry.

The last concrete moment in Mathembe’s life had been the meat buyers’ trailer, driving away across Station Plaza with a thin trickle of yellow ichor leaking onto the cobbles. Everything after was like a play of shadow-puppets on a house wall: the night train, cleaving the forest apart with its sharp steel line and the cone of its headlights; the hallucinatory half-dreams of a night spent hard class, propped against the window, without meals; the arrival by the dawn’s early light in the cacophony and vibrancy of a big city railway station, the army check at the end of the platform—the soldiers polite, expressionless as they scrutinised identities—the head that hailed her, laughing vilely, on a street corner from atop a transparent column of pulsing organicals with an invitation to a good tonguing: so much tissue and translucency, artefacts of light and movement, without texture or substance. Her spirit demanded a response, some response: anger, hatred, defiance, resentment, pain; found only a blank expressionlessness. Impassivity.

Mathembe’s Uncle Faradje lived in a pile of aged, sagging houses on a narrow sunless street called Lantern Lane that was only a few hundred metres but entire social universes away from broad, bright Keekorok Boulevard. Over the millennia the houses of Lantern Lane had grown over and into each other so that Faradje’s apartment, ostensibly on the third floor, rambled vertically from fifth to second and intertwined intimately with a number of other apartments on the same level. The rooms at the back overlooked a courtyard full of partly digested garbage thrown in by the residents in the adjoining apartments. Foot had not been set in that courtyard for decades; local legend had it that any trespasser would be instantly eaten alive by the weirdly mutated garbage digesters that roved and reproduced down there. From the aromatic detritus grew a tangle of heating ducts and water pipes and the knuckled fist of a glo-globe holdfast. The rooms that fronted Lantern Lane were dominated by an immense holographic advertisement for imported beer mounted on the tenement opposite. A fair-faced flaxen-haired Imperial beauty traced dewdrops down the side of a beer bottle, licked her lips, slipped the open top into her mouth and swigged the amber nectar down while leering lasciviously through Faradje’s grubby windows. The hologram was poorly tuned, the windows and balconies of the apartments opposite and the lives that moved within them showed through the ghostly image; a parable, for those who must seek parables, of humanity living and working and having their being within the spiritual totality of God. Much like God, the Five Hearts Beer Girl oversaw every thought and word and deed in Lantern Lane, shone her light into the deepest recesses of the apartments. Between her and the glo-globes above the back courtyard, Faradje had not bought a domestic light unit since moving into the tenement.

The radio burbled constantly in its alcove in the living room. Day and night, night and day.

Faradje was ‘something in city government’. He had long ago manoeuvred himself into a comfortable administrational nest that provided him with sufficient authority to garner respect yet was totally devoid of any responsibility whatsoever. He could have afforded much better than Lantern Lane—sinecures as a rule pay well—but comfort was the pole star to which his life was hitched. Those small efforts he did make were dedicated solely to pulling times and circumstances into a tight, cosy bundle within the warm confines of which he would one day blissfully die. The arrival of his sister, her two children and his uncle-in-law’s head were a major disruption to his well-trodden routines. The events that had brought them to his front door were so drastic, so far removed from the orbit of his days that he could scarcely bring himself to believe them. That such things could happen to his own sister…this could not be how the world truly turned. He shied away from the pain of others. He had done so all his fat life.

The head was the source of greatest discomfort to Faradje. Urbanites have an aversion to anything remotely raw and gross. The heads of Ol Tok dreamed eternity away in niches in the great walled mazes of the cemeteries, or occasionally performed useful social duties on the streets. The heads of Ol Tok never turned up in the middle of the living-room rug, slurping and belching offensively in a potful of organicals. It was obvious from word one that Faradje and the head would never peacefully coexist. While Mathembe and Hradu were going around quietly exploring their new home, moving carefully, unobtrusively, making as little intrusion as possible into the life of their new patron, the opening shots in what was to become a blood feud were being fired. Faradje and the head agreed upon every point social moral spiritual material political: the congruence of their opinions only made it the more obvious that they could not stand each other.

Mathembe lay on her mattress by the open window. She could not sleep. In Chepsenyt there had been sounds. Here were noises. Voices. Feet. Radios. Vehicles moving along Keekorok Boulevard at the end of Lantern Lane. The personal private sounds of people in the other apartments intimately entwined with Faradje’s. In the far distance, almost at the edge of hearing, the hard, flat noise of shots fired. Above it all, behind it all, the beating, beating, constant beating of helicopters in the high night air. Like God, like a prayer, the face of the Five Hearts Beer Girl searched Mathembe as she lay in white sleep. The dew-wet finger, the soft lips, the caressing tongue, asked of her: Mathembe Fileli, you have had home, life, memories, Father: everything you have ever held precious taken from you. Why will you not cry for them, why will you not feel for them, why do you lie like a stone, like dull and stupid stone, why will you not give them even one tear?

In the morning she went with her Mother, guided by Faradje’s written instructions, to Rag Market and sold what remained of Chepsenyt from two plastic bags on the ground. It did not fetch much. After all the stock had been sold to the recyclers, Mathembe’s Mother went up and down the aisles of dealers and buyers trying to sell her flesh-sculpture kit in its folding leather case. She had held it back from the recyclers. It was hers. It was precious. The only thing apart from her children, her seed, she could call her own, her precious. The dealers and buyers of Rag Market pursed their lips and shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads. When a pitying stallholder offered small change, Mathembe grabbed the leather case from his hand.

Pride, she said in the set of her face and shoulders while the children of the tenements and barrios ran around them, brandishing their plastic toy ray pistols that, overnight, had become fashionable with the arrival of the Saint-ship from another world.

The money earned from one market was gone within minutes at another. The concept of a place to buy food was quite alien to people accustomed to their every need satisfied within arm’s reach. Faradje was outraged at the four small bags of provisions Mathembe and her Mother brought back from Food Market.

‘You do not have to do that. I have plenty, more than enough to meet my needs.’

His Sister looked him the high look of pride she had relearned in Rag Market from her Daughter.

‘Pride buys no rice,’ said Faradje. ‘How much did that cost you?’

She would not answer. Mathembe it was who shrugged the expressive shrug that says everything.

Mathembe did not know what had put the seed in her heart, but that night, when the only sounds were the prayer of the radio to the listening world and the distant beating of the helicopters, she slipped out of her bed, crept to the balcony that overlooked Lantern Lane. She knelt before the Five Hearts Beer Girl: here I am to offer myself to you, strange and jealous new god of the boulevards, I come before you with nothing for everything has been taken from me. What will you give me in return for me?

Did the eyes gleam her-wards? The finger rise in blessing?

Tears: that was the first gift the Five Hearts Beer Girl gave her. All the rage, all the darkness, all the desperation, all the shattering, all the hurting was released as the Five Hearts Beer Girl brought tumbling down the walls of impassivity and numbness. Mathembe cried silently, exultantly, into the morning, and was born again. Pass beneath the waters, be born again. And the Five Hearts Girl had a second gift to bestow: a seal, a thumb-print of ice-cold beer on her forehead that admitted her to the world of the boulevards and avenues, the dark damp closes and alleyways, the plazas and intimate squares, the markets and commerces and business districts. Baptised. A believer. A member, a sister, one-of-us. To the born again, nothing is strange and alien, for everything is new, to be absorbed and appreciated with the open-spiritedness of a child defining its own world.

The city was hers, and she was the city’s now.

His name, he said was…

She did not need to hear his name. It would be some Proclaimer clatter of syllables.

He was a…

She did not need him to tell her what it was he did. She knew from the way he stood, polite-polite, when she entered the family room after a day running, walking, breathing, touching, tasting this bright toy of a city her new god had given her, and found her mother and Faradje sitting with their hands folded in that particular way you fold your hands when you meet one of their profession. She knew from the vague unctuousness of his smile, she knew from the rustle of his clothing, she knew from the whisper of his skin speaking against itself, she knew from the affected unaffectedness of his greeting to her. She knew from his smell, the smell she had smelled even in the street lobby that had ruffled the hairs on the back of her neck and made her growl softly in her throat. That smell alone would have been proof enough: a lawyer in the apartment.

‘You will have to excuse her, Mr Sharjah. She does not speak.’

‘I am sorry to hear that,’ said Mr Sharjah, mistaking, as did everyone who heard the explanation, ‘does not’ for ‘cannot’. He smiled at Mathembe. The smile was a declaration of war between them. Hate at first sight is no less remarkable than love at first sight, and considerably more common. Mathembe would rather have slowly slit her eyeballs with razorblades than let her family be placed in the confidence of this man. It was not that he was a lawyer, nor that he was a Proclaimer, though he unconsciously twisted a Spirit Lodge ring on his left middle finger. It was a chemical thing, a clashing of pheromones. She understood now how Faradje and her Grandfather (banished to the kitchen sink where the chuckle of running water over his rooticles would hopefully prevent from him hearing, and thus commenting upon, whatever the Proclaimer might have to say) could have taken such an instant animosity to each other.

‘I have been approached by your Mother to attempt to locate your Father,’ said the Advocate Sharjah, perched so on Faradje’s best chair. ‘I understand the, ah, sense of loss? you must be experiencing, the emotional trauma, the dislocation. Of course, I cannot for one instant begin to personally comprehend the suffering you have endured, any expression I might make would be glib to the point of insensitivity. Best if I were merely to repeat to you what I have already told your Mother and uncle: that I believe, firmly believe, that your Father is well and sound, in all likelihood held in some regional detention centre.’ Mr Sharjah moistened his lips with a reptile-quick flick of the tongue. ‘Despite our best efforts, it is increasingly difficult to keep politics out of our individual lives: I would not presume to judge your political inclinations; however, with the worsening situation there are bound to be, certain to be, abuses of the rule of law and gross miscarriages of justice. The innocent suffer alike with the guilty. The chaotic state of the civil government does not assist matters, the left hand does not know what the right is doing.’ A wry Proclaimer smile and a dry Proclaimer joke that was not lost on anyone in Faradje’s dirty, evil-smelling room. ‘The local militias seem to be acting independently of regional control; often, how shall we put it? acting on long-established instincts? Of course, I have no need to remind you of this, forgive me.’

‘My husband was arrested by regular army,’ said Mathembe’s Mother. ‘Not the militia.’

‘Of course. Of course. Nevertheless, in all likelihood he and the others from your township have been passed to the local authorities: the army does not have its own detention facilities. No, I think that my investigations will have to begin at the Timboroa Regional Detention Centre.’ He slapped his hands on his thin thighs, neatly but decisively, exactly as intended. ‘Of course, I cannot make the promise that I will be able to locate your husband quickly, and the authorities must be convinced that he was a coerced party in the alleged offence. But I shall certainly try with all my might and main.’ The Advocate Sharjah stood up, bowed punctiliously to each and all. ‘Leave this matter with me, Mrs Fileli. I promise you it shall receive my most assiduous attention.’

Mathembe was instructed to open the door for the Advocate and show him to the street. As she waited with him for the jeepney to arrive she made certain he saw her look. All lawyers are body-literate: so much of the truth that is sought in the court-room is not spoken aloud. She knew that he would understand she was saying: I do not trust you, you who when he says ‘not quickly’ means ‘not cheaply’, when he says ‘difficult’ means ‘expensive’: that is my Mother, her life has been shaken and beaten in ways you could not even begin to comprehend: she has known enough hurt for any five lifetimes and if you add to that hurt by raising her hopes and crushing them like insects, I promise I shall make you scream for it, do you hear me, Lawyer Sharjah?

But he had turned away from her and she did not see his face again until the moment he bent down to enter the jeepney cab, when, as the driver was saying, ‘We will have to make a detour, sir; incident of some kind over on Yohimbi Opango Street’, the light in Lantern Lane caught his face and Mathembe saw in the glitter in his eyes and teeth that he had indeed understood her, understood her every last word, and that he was saying, in the silent speech of his own heart: think what you will of me, it is no matter to me, but whatever you think of me, would you have your mother shoulder the burden of finding your father alone?

If, as its residents contend, the decaying biotectural pile of Gangerabili is the dark navel from which Ol Tok grew, then Flesh Market is the womb in which Gangerabili was conceived. A drop of angel-seed dripped into the mouth of one of the Nyakabindi demons in the sea and was conceived and gestated and squeezed out of the River-Mother onto the hard land. One hundred and twenty thousand people dwell within Gangerabili in darkness so complete that it is a proud boast among the roaring boys never to have seen light of day, under such a pressing mass of moribund biotecture that whole generations have never known what it is to stand upright, in a constant breath-damp warmed by one hundred and twenty thousand crushing lives to blood heat.

They love it. They would not live anywhere else. The intimate proximity of their living and loving and crying and dying breeds not a knife-edged irritability but a buoyant, vibrant spirit of community, of being grafted into a many-branched many-rooted tree of kinship. Ten thousand brothers. Ten thousand sisters. One hundred thousand grandmothers.

Flesh Market is a parasite with thrusting hooks and claws; Gangerabili distilled. The only light in the darkness is from bioluminescents, faltering neons, television screens, smudge fires; its labyrinthine twining so utterly inscrutable that, but for an urchin to guide you for a handful of enns, you might wander for ever a soul damned; its air stale, fetid, every breath exhaled by a dozen lungs before yours, musky with flesh perfumes and glandular secretions. Yet all around is laughter and music and bright flashing tempers like blades and no small quota of alley wisdom: bright lives burning with such intensity that your own seems wan and lacklustre in comparison.

Anything wrought by the hand of God can be bought for the flicker of a smartcard in Flesh Market.

Mathembe found the pitch on her third attempt. She had been driven from her first, close by the Tombalbaye Street entrance, by the proprietor of an oraculum. Mathembe’s Grandfather had been unwelcome competition to his stable of heads rooted deep into the Dreaming matrix. The second, on the junction of two thronged thoroughfares bright with holograms and biolights, had been in the possession of a troupe of beggars. In Flesh Market, the bizarreness and imagination of deformity was rewarded with smartcards: begging attained the status of a performing art. The beggars had borne down upon her, some in small wheeled carts, some attached to organical or mechanical transport. Mathembe had fled. Her final pitch was beside a small street shrine to Saint Zanzan Be, Patron of the Crossing Ways, whose bailiwick included aspects as diverse as telecommunications, banking, premarital love, social work, harbours, railway stations, airports and forest paths. The shrine, poorly maintained, with only the faintest rattle of enns in the offerings box, stood across a litter-strewn alley from a stand-up café. The fat, slightly wobbling proprietor, known as A Dose of Worms, watched the thin, dark-haired girl, skin sun-darkened—she would soon lose that in the gloom, he thought—set down a head on the dusty cobbles, look around her nervously, and open a small leather case. Her activities were marginally more interesting than the television, which shone blue and unregarded on a high shelf above the tables.

Mathembe had been taught the skill but it had never become the art with which her Mother had sung the double-helix song into the heart of things in the cool cool cool of the Fifteenth Street conservatory. Self-conscious and terminally awkward, Mathembe took the lump of undifferentiated plasm in her hands, turned it over and over, feeling for the fissures and grooves. With a twist, the ball fell apart into two identical pieces of synthetic flesh. She lifted one up, breathed life into it, pressed it to her lips, shaped it with the silent words of her tongue and mouth, turning it over and over and over in her fingers, breaking it along its crease lines into units, stretching and pulling and shaping and moulding those units with her fingers, with the silent words of life on her lips, fusing, reforming, building, creating until before her face in the open palms of her hands lay a tiny, delicate, diaphanous flying creature, like a minuscule helicopter spun from silk, all eyes and legs and whirring rotors.

Behind his counter, A Dose of Worms was grudgingly impressed.

Mathembe threw the flying creature into the air, sent it whirring and buzzing around the heads of the people moving along the alley. Some looked, some batted it away from their faces, most walked on unnoticing. Mathembe called the flying thing back to her hand. Across the alley, A Dose of Worms shrugged sympathetically and poked at grilling things. By noon—however noon might be reckoned in Gangerabili—Mathembe’s original ball of plasm had replicated twenty-five times. Small cuddly, feathery, big-eyed blinking cooing things clung to her jacket; skittering, skirling things ran in carefully defined orbits around her bare feet and flying, hovering, buzzing things roosted in her hair.

Not a single one had sold.

‘Give it up, granddaughter of mine,’ the head said. ‘It is a good idea but it is not working.’

Mathembe kicked its pot, nodded. A child stood on the bank of the river of people. Its parents had paused for a moment to stroke and sniff at a fur-grower’s stall close by. A girl: seven, eight, well dressed, well fed, pale-skinned pale-haired. A young Imperial. Mathembe crouched, offered a tiny pink-furred mewling something in the palm of her right hand.

‘Buy a toy?’ the head whispered. ‘Only eighty enns.’ Mathembe gestured for the child to take it. The little girl touched it apprehensively, expecting fangs in the fur, claws in the cuddliness. The creature blinked its huge neotenous eyes at her. The little girl shrieked in delight. Her parents came to see what was so pleasing to their daughter. The little girl held the toy up to them. It waved its stubby arms and legs, mewled again.

The head opened its mouth to spiel. Mathembe nudged the pot with her elbow.

‘How much?’ the man said. A tourist-talk pay-by-the-day brainplant was looped behind his ear.

‘Eighty enns,’ the head said. Still kneeling, Mathembe reached out the cardreader on its thong around her neck. Read-outs glowed, transactions transacted. Only when the tourist family were beyond eye and ear shot did Mathembe permit herself a small leap and air-punch of victory. A Dose of Worms nodded, smiled. A girl was sent over from the Tipsi Café with two bowls of small eats. Solidarity.

‘They will not be so happy when it falls apart in three weeks,’ said the head. Mathembe, fingers greasy with meat slivers, gestured in the way that says to those who have eyes to see, she will have lost interest long before then. Mathembe sold five toys that day. In celebration she bought a flask of raqi from A Dose of Worms and liberally watered her Grandfather’s rooticles.

‘You want me going back to your Mother pissed and legless?’ the head complained, unconvincingly.

There is a shrug, if you can master it, that says exactly: you have been legless for years anyway.

Mathembe’s Mother was furious. A cold, silent fury that burned hotter than any mere display of temper. It is for you, the money, for the Advocate Sharjah, Mathembe tried to say. I will not let him accuse me of not doing my part to get my Father back. But her Mother would not hear, would not touch the money. She could not tell Mathembe, but she feared that her silent daughter had earned it by the selling of her own, private flesh on the streets of Ol Tok. Mathembe left the cardreader and the small leather case on the floor and went up to her shared room to sulk. Later; much later, her Mother came to her. The small leather case of plasmballs was open in her hands. She took out a globe of dormant life. And she showed Mathembe how to do things, make things, shape things, sing things like she had never dreamed.

The walk that says I am making it is not a learned thing. Not a thing that thrusts its roots through the skin behind your ear into your brain to go chasing harum-scarum through your frontal lobes while you sleep. It is an infection that spreads through your body, cell by cell, muscle by muscle, joint by joint; a divine humility so that at no time can you ever be sure enough of yourself to say yesterday I was not making it, but today I am. It is a gradual infusion of confidence into the bones and blood.

By the end of her first week in Flesh Market there were enough tips tithes and tradables in her belt pouch to barter for a set of tiny ceramic bells to decorate her favourite black skin boots. In the upper room that was filled with the light of Our Lady of the Dewdrop Beer Bottle she turned and twisted and clicked her fingers to the never-ceasing music from the radio and the tiny, holy bells rang and sang.

She gained a place. Hey you, yes you, you no good damn goondah tramp bum, take your custom melanomas off off out of here someplace else, this pitch is spoken for.

She gained a name. Go to the Bell-girl, cannot miss her, corner of Belladonna and Shine, right, and across from the Tipsi Café: she got bells on her boots never speaks, just jingles maybe something funny up there (tap tap finger to temple tappity-tap) but she got real magic real magic in those fingers of hers: the Bell-girl, that is how we all know her.

She became fashionable. The jewellery, dear heart? Down Flesh Market of course. Where have you been hiding yourself away? Used to be disgusting. Used to be. Low. Common. Vulgar. Indescribably vulgar. These days, quite the place to go. See this? Look, see, it is alive. Is that not quite the most extraordinary thing? Of course they do not last very long but, well, that can be a positive advantage. I mean to say, one has to stay abreast of fashion.

She was perfectly placed to exploit the new fad when it hit. It had been an occasion for national rejoicing when an Ol Tok lifeware designer had won the commission to create a body for the captain of the visiting Saint-ship to occupy while visiting the world. A shrewd reader of the commercial tides, he had opted for a percentage royalty on derivative material rather than a flat-rate payment. No sooner had the captain stepped from the tank in his ruggedly-handsome-(but-not-too)-indeterminately-coloured-so-as-to-cause-no-offence-to-any-racial-group-well-muscled-but-sensitive-with-it body than a torrent of Ship-Captain posters, Ship-Captain masks, Ship-Captain jewellery, Ship-Captain book covers, Ship-Captain personal computers, Ship-Captain personal vibrators, Ship-Captain cups mugs wine glasses coolflasks, Ship-Captain tee-shirts, Ship-Captain jackets, I-♥-the-Ship-Captain stickers for any conceivable surface to which a sticker might adhere, Ship-Captain moving tattoos, Ship-Captain slouch hats, Ship-Captain toiletries, Ship-Captain boxed individual dinners, Ship-Captain underwear, Ship-Captain wunder-gum, Ship-Captain brand rice beer came thundering from the Free-Trade Zones and Special Economic Regions. Within one month the designer retired to his new bel-air mansion on a hilltop overlooking the river that was as wide as the sea, obscenely rich. Within one month of his moving in among the neo-gentry the bel-air mansion burned. The Proclaimer youths of Fijjad Hills were choosy about their neighbours.

And down in the guts of Gangerabili, across the alleyway from A Dose of Worms’ stand-up café, Mathembe Fileli rode to no small measure of wealth and success on the crest of the wave of fad and fashion. She could not replicate the balls of plasm fast enough to meet the demand for her Ship-Captain toys and homunculi. Of course, they would fall apart and dissolve into evil-smelling slime in some hard-to-find corner of the house in three weeks but by then the fad amongst Ol Tok’s crucial women to have a micro-Ship-Captain waving at their society friends from deep in their cleavage would be unutterably passé. In two frenetic weeks Mathembe made the equivalent of two month’s takings. Enough to contribute to Advocate Sharjah’s own personal strivings to the height of Fijjad Hills, where, because he knew the handshakes and wore the right ring, he could rest assured that his bel-air mansion would not burn down in a single night.

So the Five Hearts Beer Girl honoured her compact with Mathembe.

The new gods are the most eager to explore their powers and limitations.

The new gods are the most jealous of their divinity.

The most powerful are always the least trustworthy.

The story of Mathembe and the Nationalist prisoners of war

This is the story of how what is freely, freely given may be freely, freely taken. To tell it adequately, we must go back to a time before Mathembe and her family came to the house of Faradjeon Lantern Lane. We must go back to the time of the hunger strike.

To tell of the hunger strike adequately, we must go back to a time before the heads of the rebels (or the heads of the heroes, such discriminations are always a matter of opinion) even came to Chepsenyt, to the dispute over the Emperor’s portrait.

To tell the reason for the dispute over the Emperor’s portrait we would need to go back a thousand years or more to the time when the Empire decided to stabilise its recently annexed still-rebellious transfluvial province by colonising it with loyal, hard-working, peace-loving, right-worshipping Imperial citizens.

But this is the story of Mathembe and the Nationalist prisoners of war, not the story of Empire and Province, Proclaimer and Confessor: you can read that story in any good history. This space is properly Mathembe’s and if we shift the focus from her to her background it is only to place a frame around her life and times.

If you saw a portrait of the Emperor you would not be greatly impressed. You would see an old and very small man, eyes sunk deep in folds of skin despite the rejuvenation treatments, dressed in the simple white silk robe of state and holding a decorated inscribed fan. Your first thought would be that he looks more like a monkey dressed up in human clothes, like you see in the advertisements on the television, but you would immediately suppress that thought because, monkey or no, man or no, he is ultimately an Emperor, graced with the mandate of God. Even though this Emperor in his lifetime has seen his Empire dwindle from a quarter of the planet to a cluster of small free-trade zones and a single province to which, because it is the last, it clings all the more tenaciously.

The Emperor is pictured sitting in a garden. The artist has attempted to convey a sense of serenity and tranquillity radiating from the August Personage: the still centre that holds an unravelling commonwealth together. Symbols of that tranquillity and serenity abound throughout the portrait for those who have eyes to see. The artist—though, in strictest interpretation Proclaimerism, the representation of the human form is an offence against God—has been as kind as his artistic integrity will allow to the wrinkle-shrouded eyes, the wizened monkey-face.

However, it is not the portrait’s qualities as a work of art that are at issue: it is that it is the representation of the Divinely Ordained Presence. More importantly, that, by Imperial Decree 9, 936, 3 3 2, the Imperial likeness must be displayed in all places of public intercourse commercial, social, recreational, political. Including the council chambers of the Ol Tok Metropolitan Council, where the councillors, before embarking upon their vital deliberations, were required to stand and bow respectfully to the little extension of the Imperial Personage beaming out from the Garden of Contemplation in the Jade City across the bustling, polluted land, across the river, wide as the sea, into the council chambers of Ol Tok.

When the Ourselves Alone councillors, under the leadership of Adé Janderambele, refused to stand and bow respectfully to the Image Divine, they found themselves immediately suspended from public office by V. J. Shrih-Ghandda, appointed governor of Ol Tok Prefecture by the express command of the Jade City. The dozen or more pro-Imperial parties and the Proclaimer population as a political generalisation chorused approval. The law after all was the law, despite the religious conscience clauses many members of the more fundamentalist parties invoked to prevent themselves bowing down to dull-eyed icons. The suspended councillors were undaunted; indeed, soared to greater prominence on the crest of a wave of defiance that swept the Confessor populace. In full regalia of office, they presented themselves in attendance at the various committees and bodies upon which they had been elected to serve only to find themselves politely, but strictly, barred entrance by the masked public servants of the governor. Protests that democracy—a word that has always served so faithfully those who would wield it in their personal interests—was being ground thin by the wheels of bigotry were met by the Proclaimer councillors standing side by side across the council-chamber doors, holding up the Imperial likeness while pointing to an Imperial heart-and-hand flag draped across the door lintel. ‘Tread on it, would ye? Tread on it?’ the councillors were asked.

The Divine Mandate, to those who had eyes to observe the embarrassing débâcle of symbols and emblems, seemed wistful for his gardens and bridges and gay summer pavilions.

There were protests. Of course.

There were demonstrations. Of course.

There were corpses. Of course.

Though denied access to official information channels, the barred councillors issued calls for a city-wide campaign of civil disobedience which spread with the speed and enthusiasm of a venereal disease through the Confessor boros. From Gangerabili and Mittita and Drug Market and Soul Market and Cemetery Hills, from the sampan cities and pontoon townships of Kaléhé and Waterside, from suburban Kilimatinde and Ladywell unrolling like a richly patterned carpet of gardens and swimming pools towards the indeterminate south, portraits of the Emperor—now a little bemused and perhaps nostalgic among his geneform trees—were turned to the wall. In shops, schools, markets, news-booths, cafés, restaurants, sports clubs, football grounds, dance halls, drinking clubs, television halls, shebeens, suburban railway stations, shrines, oraculums, the cardboard rear of the Emperor faced the world.

In the history of democracy—that word again—there can seldom have been as unrepresentational a piece of legislation as the cram-read Ol Tok council by-law declaring it a punishable offence to show public disrespect to the image, likeness or name of the Emperor. The measure was passed by eighty-eight votes, two more than a quorum. To manage even that, three councillors had to be brought back from holidays in sunnier, happier parts of the planet, and one rushed, still connected to organical support systems, from the Saint Lia-Mulea House of Healing. One hundred and seventy-six suspended Ourselves Alone councillors took no part in either debate or vote.

The Ol Tok police, as ever the shit-end agents of political masturbation, after only three days of snap raids and inspections, declared the law unenforceable: the Prefecture Prosecutor’s Office broke down under the mudslide of unprocessed information and refused to handle any further prosecutions. The Confessors crowed and farted. Adé Janderambelé and his Ourselves Alone councillors were chaired and cheered through the boulevards of Ghiambeni into Keekorok and all the way along the river-front corniche that is fifteen kilometres long. Victory was the toast at the lagoon-side parties in laid-back Kilimatinde.

Gnawed by the tapeworm of humiliation, the Imperial councillors found refuge in an obscure clause of the Councillors’ Oath of Office (sworn in the name of the nice little monkey-man in the garden to truly and faithfully represent the people of Ol Tok’s one hundred and sixteen boros, with which Ourselves Alone had never found quarrel) declaring that any councillor who wilfully failed to carry out his sworn and elected duties was liable to prosecution and fine.

Summonses were issued.

Those summoned refused to attend the hearings.

One hundred and seventy-eight Ourselves Alone councillors were fined. One hundred and fifty enns, the price of one of Mathembe’s Ship-Captain dolls, the maximum the court could impose.

Seventy-five Ourselves Alone councillors refused to pay the fine. And, against all popular belief, seventy-five Ourselves Alone councillors were sentenced to organical imprisonment until such time as they agreed to respect the law and pay the nominal fine.

There were riots.

There were deaths.

There were more young, beautiful heads in the niches of Cemetery Hills’ meandering walls where the prostitutes called and fluted by batflight.

The seventy-five semi-dendrified prisoners stood in a small enclosed yard at the rear of the rambling Law House. Within a week, fifty had repented, ordered the necessary transactions made from their credit banks, and been returned wholly to flesh.

At the beginning of the second week Adé Janderambelé announced that he and his twenty-four colleagues would neither eat nor drink nor take any form of sustenance until the court orders against them were quashed and all suspended councillors were fully reinstated.

Two days later, Mathembe and her family arrived on the night train—hard class, no meals—from Timboroa.

It is now day forty-six of the hunger strike. Here comes Mathembe in her shorts and black skin boots with ringing singing bells and seal-up jacket with the big colourful logos of international corporations from countries she cannot even place on the globe, with her hair cut one centimetre all over because of the heat and the insects and the thousand parasites of Flesh Market, and her belt pouches full of plasmballs.

She could tell they were trouble by the way they moved through the crowd, like an overlarge turd forcing itself from constricted bowels. She saw them enter A Dose of Worms’ café where her Grandfather spent his days now the business was established, drinking raqi, cheating at fili and shouting ill-informed comments at the television news. The exact details of what business the trouble boys transacted there were invisible to Mathembe—a teenager was holding up a furry pink cuddle-thing in front of her and inquiring how much?

Then it was her turn. She had never seen such a pair of thoroughgoing hoods in her life. Hair shaved to within a millimetre of non-existence and patterned with obscene ideograms. Matching jackets, tight tight shorts. Stomping thick-soled boots. Live furs draped across the right shoulders, thonging around wrists. Thick, square faces.

Her Father had grown more intelligent-looking trux.

‘Would you care to make a contribution to the Nationalist Prisoners of War Fund?’ Trux Number One. A cardreader flickered grey digits at her.

‘Support the hunger strikers.’ Trux Number Two. Oddly high voices. Mathembe, shrugged, smiled. Furry pink cuddle-thing had been that day’s only sale.

‘Come on, where is your loyalty? Support the prisoners of war.’ Trux Number One smiled.

Mathembe frowned.

‘Minimum suggested donation, three hundred enns.’ Trux Number Two coughed solicitously, glanced downwards. The toe of his thick-soled boot was resting lightly, but firmly enough to prevent escape, on a small, crawling reptile toy.

‘Really, you should consider it not so much a donation as an investment,’ said Trux Number One as his partner bore slowly down and burst the little writhing creature in a splatter of green flesh and ichor.

Three hundred enns. Two days’ takings. Money she had saved for the Advocate Sharjah. Trux Number One stuck a little green sticker on the end of Mathembe’s ugly-cutesy nose, swaggered, laughing, with his partner to the next entrepreneur. The sticker read I ♥ the Nationalist Prisoners of War.

No one that evening seemed much surprised when, at the meal table, Mathembe made a sudden gesture with her fist jabbing out from her heart that says unmistakably: extortion. Her Grandfather esteemed it an honour to have been considered worthy of paying protection to Ourselves Alone. The Struggle had to fund itself somehow. Uncle Faradje shrugged. Uncle Faradje’s sole defence against an inimical world was a shrug. Her Mother sympathised when Mathembe explained that she would not be able to give any money that week but was oddly resigned. Hradu, as usual, was not there at table with them; out running with his boyfriends, playing football in the global gutter, spraying political slogans on the universal wall. As they sat eating their evening food with their fingers the radio said that the hunger strike was in its forty-sixth day and the condition of some of the protesting councillors was giving cause for concern.

One summer in Chepsenyt there had been a plague of vampire moths. Great soft whirring things, with wings like rich carpets, and as soft, and as thick. Despite the heat of the summer nights, Mrs Fileli had ordered all the windows shuttered and firmly barred at dusk each evening. No one was to go out unless protected by several layers of net and veil.

‘One bite will not harm you. It will sting a little, and no one likes the thought of some soft-winged thing drinking their blood, but it will not do any great harm,’ was the advice she gave a wide-eyed Mathembe. ‘But even that once is too much. Because once they get the taste of blood, they will come back, again and again and again until you are bled white.’

Their shoulders were as broad. Their smiles were as synthetic. Their shorts were as tight tight. Their request was identical.

Suggested minimum donation…

She did not have three hundred enns.

How much did she have?

Seventy-seven enns. A jingle, a jangle of change. Look. See? Here it is, all on the reader. Here are the digits. You cannot make them lie no matter how dearly you wish it.

Seventy-seven enns would be an acceptable donation.

They took the jingle-jangle of small change.

Three times. In as many weeks.

Hunger strike day sixty.

The advent of authority always advertised itself in Flesh Market long before its physical arrival. A murmur in the crowd. A turning of heads that way. A slow but noticeable osmosis of population the other way. A certain contagious nervousness, a certain exaggeration of normality into abnormality. A Dose of Worms dusting off the portrait of the old old Emperor he kept behind beer crates back of the bar and hanging the Divine Personage on the wall.

Beams of white light played through the fetid darkness of the alleys. Two policepersons. No fat, pathetic Kimininis and Kimililis: these were young, serious, professional. Dedicated to law. Three soldiers with battlepacks and weapons formed their escort. The light beams were from shoulder-mounted spotlights. They were checking: Something. Mathembe felt fear in the pit of her womb like an intimation of death. They stopped at A Dose of Worms’ counter. He wiped glasses while they checked papers. A Dose of Worms caught Mathembe Across the Alley’s eye, flicked his eyes: go.

Then the searchlights turned upon her. The disclosing light of God from which no secrets are hid, no desires concealed.

‘Have you any means of identification?’

She proffered the cardreader. Spirals of genetic material bonded to the polymers tagged each device unique to its owner. The taller, fatter policeperson inserted it into some official device that made noises.

‘Thank you Mizz Fileh. That will be all. Oh. I almost forgot. Can I see your public trader’s licence?’

It was as if she had been struck from behind with something unimaginably huge, unimaginably heavy. Like a planet. Her lungs forgot to breathe. Her heart forgot to beat. Her brain beat like a Proclaimer prayer gong. She fumbled in her belt pouch, offered a tattered scrap of paper. It was a tram timetable from Gangerabili to Keekorok. A diversion, nothing more.

The taller, fatter policeperson opened the scrap. As the frown materialised on his serious, professional face, Mathembe bolted.

In the forests around Chepsenyt she had run out of her Mathembeness into the intimate consideration of God, but she never ran then as she ran now. With the Ukerewe Active Service Unit bounding and cackling and whooping after her soul she had outrun even God, but she never ran from them as she ran from the soldiers through the warren of Flesh Market.

Shouts: from behind: ‘Stop. That girl. Stop that girl. Stop her.’

The people parted before her, she could see the faces, frozen by the relativity of her movement, the small, sly smile, the tilt of the eyes.

And the soldiers came after.

Dodging through stalls hung with slowly flexing fat-worms. Jumping over plastic sheets laid out with rare organs. Ducking under bookstands, around sex-circuit booths. Pushing through racks of oracle-heads, waking them from dreams of paradise.

And the soldiers came after.

She ran, panting with fear, with exertion, with the knowledge that, like that small woman, that small muscular woman who had run her down in the forests near Timboroa, who had called her girlie, she could never outrun a bullet or a target-seeking missile. Would it hurt tremendously? Would there be no pain at all? Would it be fast? Would it be slow, would she be allowed to see her spine and lungs and small flat breasts fountaining outward in a spray of bone and meat and blood?

She turned into an alleyway so narrow that the overhanging walls of biotecture met overhead. An arm snagged her. A square, crop-headed bully-boy face grinned at her.

‘Now daughter, seeing your, shall we say, predicament? was it not a wise thing that you made sure your insurance was paid up?’

The hand stroked her cheek. The bully-boy face pouted, a moue of mock regret. The hand released her.

‘Get. Go. Run. Leave this to the big boys.’ The big fat hand pushed her away. Army boots splashed over piss and ichor-soaked cobbles: close, closing. Mathembe looked around her. The grinning boy was gone but the street was filled with cries, Ghost-Boy howlings, the thunder of hands drumming on walls. She ran on. Behind her, made loud, immense by the acoustic architecture of inner Gangerabili, weapon-fire; the hard, flat sounds of bioweapons in ambush. Here the houses grew so close that she had to turn on her side to squeeze between. A forsaken spot to die, squeezed between two warm, throbbing walls of biotecture. Finally the two walls sealed into one. Escape was a triangular slit where wall met cobbles. Sobbing with fear and exertion, Mathembe pulled herself through on her belly by the tips of her fingers. She could no longer hear the bootfalls behind her. She could no longer hear the gunfire. She could no longer hear anything but the beating of her own heart that seemed to have set the whole billion-ton cancer of Gangerabili throbbing in resonance. She pulled herself forward, pulled herself forward along the dark tunnel through the heart of the dying boro until the slit opened into a crack into a crawlway and finally into a narrow, twining canyon of an alleyway that went up sheer to a vaulted roof studded with windows kilometres above her head.

Radio news. Hunger Strike. Day sixty. A joint army—police patrol engaged on a routine search for illicit street traders in the Gangerabili/Flesh Market district is reported missing after giving pursuit to a suspect.

No trace of the three soldiers was ever found. Not so much as the bulb from a shoulder-mounted searchlight.

It was a week before Mathembe could go back to the tunnels. She pleaded sickness: many and arcane viruses were continually abroad in the tunnels. In the privacy of her room, in the sanctum of her heart, she raged at the Five Hearts Beer Girl. I do not wish to be part of it, I do not wish to be drawn into it, how dare they presume to do this for me, who wants nothing to do with them?

No god has ever recognised a mortal’s right to rage at them. When she did return, smouldering with a diffuse, directionless rage, Mathembe found A Dose of Worms looked at her in a new way, the way that says, to those with Mathembe-eyes, now you are one of us indeed.

That was the look the fat meatboys wore when next they came swinging along the alley. Smiles expanded to continental plates of designer enamel as they pushed away Mathembe’s proffered cardreader.

‘No further contributions are required, thank you,’ said the one who seemed to have been given both’s share of words. ‘Consider it a public relations investment.’

He put a green I ♥ sticker on Mathembe’s nose, and as she tore it off, slapped one on her ass. Laughing, swinging along, off they went, designer butts moving under those tight tight shorts, broad body-shop shoulders rolling under live-fur drapes. And Mathembe stood as if she had been held down by the big, beautiful, smiling boys, and slowly, pleasurefully, politically raped.

And that is the story of Mathembe and the Nationalist prisoners of war.

The firing had kept her awake all night and as she lay learning to distinguish the sporadic shots of the Warriors of Destiny from the brutal staccato answers of the soldiers’ heavy weapons, she became aware that, first Hradu in his bed on the shadow side of the room, and then her mother in the room upstairs, and then Faradje, and then the head whirling like a demon bat through the Dreaming, and finally every other soul in Lantern Lane, was breathing in exact synchronisation with her. Heavy armour thundered on Keekorok and in the morning, as Mathembe’s ceramic bells joined the morning throng, there were three new trees on the corner of Keekorok and Mama Ngee outside the fire-blackened shell of a newsagent booth. Small trees, small and twisted; you would hardly notice them, busy on your way to another day, another enn. But they stopped the jingle of Mathembe’s bells, stopped them dead. People pressed around her on their way to another day, another enn while she stared, stared, stared at the trees twisted in a slow, vegetable agony while images so terrible she had to put them to sleep the instant she conceived them rose from their roosts in a storm of wings.

We are still, join us in our stillness, we three, for a moment, for ever.

Thrusting, blind branches push from Mr Kakamega the traix grower’s eyesockets.

The small woman goes bouncing down the slope, slipping and sliding toward the rooftops of Timboroa. And the missile comes after. The missile comes after. The missile…

The wind blows across the bare, stretched vocal chords of the heads of the traitors.

Blazing trux run through the streets of her memories. The three trees hold her like a stone in the great soul river of people passing unconcerned along Keekorok Boulevard while they ask her the one question she has never dared ask herself.

Do you really believe he is still alive?

Existence, the Jantic mystagogues teach, is not a precipitous teeter along the mountain-ridge of God’s will, fearful of the abyss of self-loss on either side; existence is a valley hemmed in by high mountains through which many paths wend. Life, which is more than existence—that both Confessor and Proclaimer would agree, is a pilgrimage through the valley of the will of God, steered and guided by certain landmarks. Events, people, places, relationships. Births, marriages, deaths; parents, friends, lovers; houses, universities, prisons; we migrate, we navigate, we peregrinate towards around through them.

Or…is it that life is a river breaking in eddies of circumstance around the clashing rocks of reality?

Or…is it that life is a spatio-temporal continuum and people, places, circumstances the stellar masses to which we are gravitational bound?

Whatever the answers, if answers there be, the question Mathembe was forced to confront on Keekorok Boulevard turned her life-path inevitably towards the Bujumbura Ballpark.

Troubled times had spread the park’s reputation far beyond the district in which it stood, beyond the city, beyond even the land: it cast a monolithic shadow across an entire planet’s conscience.

Mathembe arrived as the banks of floodlights were being switched on, panel by panel of hot white light. The tiled plaza before the stadium, where in the days of Sporting Bujumbura’s glory a thousand and one ticket touts, fast-food hawkers, wine sellers and street entertainers had plied their trade, now seemed in the fading light like a suburb of Khirr, the Proclaimer hell. Flickering trash-light, a loose constellation of a hundred and more smudge fires. Tattered banners moved in the smoke from the fires: angry words, slashed, and torn. Faces gathered beneath them, demon-lit. Somewhere a bass drum beat. Somewhere bells and finger cymbals chimed counterpoint. Somewhere voices chanted. Names. Endless mantras of names.

Bodies crowded past her, carried her towards the bright shining gate and the parked troop carriers. The Emperor’s men were black silhouettes against the floodlight glare within. Someone collided with Mathembe. She turned, glimpsed a hooded face. A white face. A twisted, melted face, like one cast in clay and pulled by fingers. Demon. Mathembe fled. Gasping she fought through the people towards the tram halt. The shaking did not stop until she was within two stops of Gangerabili.

One of her most powerful Chepsenyt memories had been touched. She was too young, her mother had said, it was not a book for children, but she would not be told and one night when Mother and Father were out wining with friends in Founding Tree Square, wetting the head of a new-born child, she had taken the book of religious stories down from its alcove, hooked the reader behind her ear and pressed the contacts to her temples. It had taken tranquillisers to get her to sleep that night, a lunar month before she could sleep without waking from nightmares of the Nyakabindi, the evil that dwelt in the volcanic mid-ocean ridges of the southern sea.

On the tram the spell of the drum and the fitful firelight and the pull of the pure white light were broken. The face that had confronted her had not been that of a demon, but a funeral mask. Their malformed, eyeless gaze had surveyed her childhood from their hooks on the memory-room wall. She had worn one when her grandfather had passed stubbornly into the Dreaming. Their circuitry stimulated memories of the dead, reassured the wearer with a twilit glow of remembrance. The mask outside the stadium had been re-engineered to project overpowering loss and rage at the face-to-face range at which Mathembe had encountered it. The psychic shock chilled her still.

Mathembe remembered an urban legend she had been told by her Grandfather; the kind of story you are told by someone who knows somebody who knows the actual people involved or was there when it happened.

Versions of this story can be found in every township and big city boro. Accordingly, every township and urban boro claims it as its own. In every version, the central character is an old woman whose beloved husband passes into the Dreaming after many, many, many years of devotion and love. Distraught, the old woman dons a mourning mask but at the end of the appropriate period she declines to remove it and place it back on its hook on the wall. The memories, she says, are too precious, she cannot let them go, not yet, let her stay with them for just a little while. So she keeps the mask on and days pass into weeks pass into months and every time her family and friends suggest she take the mask off she says give me just a little more time with him, just a little more. I am old and memories are all I have. But the day comes when the remembered face is not so clear, the remembered voice less distinct and she says yes, I can now pick up my own life, what remains of it, and carry it forward, I will remove the funeral mask. But when she comes to lift it off it will not come. It will not move. It had bonded itself to her flesh, become one with her. She cannot take it off even if she wishes. She goes to her family, her friends, the doctors and healers and specialists and holy people but they cannot pull it off, cut it off, science it off, pray it off either. She becomes known as the Lady of the Mask. She stops going out. She stops seeing people. She shuts herself up in her house and only leaves at night when the sight of her funeral mask in the dark streets frightens small children and love-couples. She disappears from the life of the community. She becomes legend. It is only when the people begin to grow suspicious that there has been no movement, no light, no radio in the house for too long that some brave women and men break down the door. They find the woman, dead on the floor, with the mask on her face. They go to her and find that it lifts off, clear away, as if it had never been there at all.

And is that it? Is that the end of the story?

No, this is. This is the end of the story. The rider. The kicker. The sting. When they take the mask off, even the bravest of the brave men and women go pale. The face beneath the mask is not the face of the old woman. It is the face of her long-dead husband.

These mythic voices, that rule our days and our long, dark nights.

That was a legend. This is a proverb, likewise common to all people in all times, yet each considers it unique: before you ask the question, do you want to know the answer?

In the night, some vagrant soul in need of a blessing had left a can of beer as an offering in the shrine to Zanzan Bé. Some less pious soul had drunk the rice beer, crushed the plastic can and left it balanced disrespectfully on the saint’s head. A swirl of warm wind spun off from some small chaotic disturbance far and deep under Gangerabili knocked the can from its perch and sent it rattling over the cobbles in front of Mathembe’s pitch.

The Five Hearts Beer Girl regarded Mathembe Fileli. Knowing a message from God when she saw one, Mathembe picked up the can, tried to decipher the New Speech copy on the back.

Five Hearts.

Heart of Good Times.

Heart of Cordiality.

Heart of Generosity.

Heart of Friendship and Fellowship.

Heart of Courageousness.

The can clattered on over the cobbles, onward into the deeps of Flesh Market. A Dose of Worms looked up from his hot-shop counter and saw that Mathembe Across the Alley was gone.

Her apprehension increased with every stop she drew closer to Bujumbura Ballpark. She unfolded the note she had scrawled and read it, refolded it, put it in her pouch, took it out, unfolded it, read it, folded it again, put it back in her pouch again, re-took it out, re-unfolded it, re-read it…

Have you seen my Father?

His name is Kolé Fileli.

Daylight in the great tiled plaza multiplied the distances between the shapes and forces of the previous night. No longer close, no longer threatening. Beneath the ripped, spray-painted banners the protesters maintained their vigils. The sectists kept up their continuous chanting of the names of the disappeared. Beneath the hooded robes, the funeral masks abroad on Bujumbura Plaza were mere masks, nothing more, masks that could be taken off and laid to rest. By some trick of perspective, the circling walls of the stadium appeared to be reaching for Mathembe to draw her into the open gates and the armoured vehicles that guarded them.

Apprehension. The roll of paper grew damp in the sweat and heat of her hand.

The soldiers did not even spare her a look as she passed between them into the tunnel. Along the arched passage were lined those guilty of small misdemeanours against the Emperor. Mathembe started unashamedly at a half-woman, naked flesh from the waist up, from the waist down, gnarled trunk firmly rooted into the concrete.

‘Why don’t you just piss off you stupid little bitch?’ the half-woman growled at her. Stung, it was a moment before Mathembe thought to unfold her slip of paper. She approached a personable-looking young man with muscles that made you want to lick them. A hand gripped her arm. A funeral mask drew close to her face.

‘Leave them alone. They will pick your pockets as soon as look at you. Bribe the guards, they can; shorten the sentence. Especially do not go near that one, he is a real bastard. He will inform on you, pretend you are an accomplice of his, accuse you of anything just for the fun of seeing someone else in his place. That girl there, see?’ the masked figure—man, saint, spirit?—pointed to a girl of Mathembe’s age with beautiful cascading black hair. ‘He got her five weeks, and all she did was say to him she felt solidarity with him. Leave them alone, do you hear?’ Tears ran down the girl with beautiful hair’s face, down her beautiful crescent-moon breasts, down the rough, scarred wood of her trunk.

Mathembe came into the afternoon sunlight of the stadium.

She opened her hand and let the slip of paper fall to the ground.

Row upon row, row upon row, row upon row, the man-trees filled the ballpark. Thousands…thousands…She had expected tens, dozens, maybe a few hundred. But thousands…thousands. Mathembe descended the steps between the tiers of seating into the amphitheatre. Branches covered her, shaded her. She went along the first row, bewildered, benumbed by the sameness of the trees. Trunks. Branches. Twigs. Trunks, branches, twigs. Trunks branches twigs. Trunks branches twigs. The outstretched hands of the condemned wheeled above her, mercy mercy Mathembe Fileli mercy mercy child have mercy. She ran faster. Faster.

This person kneeling on the neat carpetmoss, arms lifted in supplication? imploring? futile rage? That person, arms wrapped around a knotted trunk, rubbing cheek against rough bark until blood flowed; this untidy pile of biolights, beer bottles and chocolate; that child sitting in the fork of two branches kicking its heels; these icons and spirit-medals, those coins and dead smartcards hammered into the trunk; those branches painted with the colours of an imaginary nation, black, silver and green. On and on and on, up and down the rows so many so many too many trying to take them all in all those trees twigs trunks branches hooded people weeping masks all whirling and blurring into a relativistic smear of impressions so many so many too many how could you know how would you tell she might have passed it it might have been the first tree of the very first row but how would she ever know, how did any of them know, should she go back and search through them one at a time, a whole day, if need be over each tree to pick some memory of identity from bark and branch and leaf but there were so many so many too many and any one of them might be, might have been…

Her Father.

Falling. Falling. Forward. Too many. Too many.

Mathembe rolls into a tight, foetal huddle. The trees lift their branches over her. Benediction. The masks and the robes push push past.

She hears footsteps.

She hears a rustle of folding fabric.

She hears the air displaced by a body bending near hers.

She hears breath in-taken, the moist click of lips parting in the instant before words are spoken.

‘Are you all right?’

—

‘Are you looking for someone?’

—

‘Of course you are looking for someone. We are all looking for someone. Else why would any sane soul be here?’

—

‘Your first time? I was like that my first time here. First time here; listen to the man. You would think I was like one of those old, dark dog-women who have been coming here every day for twelve, thirteen months until they are as twisted and gnarled and root-rotten as the trees. Probably more so. No, I have been nine times. This is my ninth visit.’

Mathembe looked up to see what it was that had so highhandedly interrupted her anguish. He knelt between her and the sun. Long, soft waves of hair fell continually into his eyes and were pushed futilely away with large useless hands.

‘Stones.’

He stood up, offered a large, useless hand to help Mathembe up from the turf.

‘You have to look for the stones. Sometimes if they know they are going to be executed they will pick up a pebble or a loose cobble or something and write their names on it. They hold onto this stone while the guards strip them and wire them in the changing rooms below. Then they take them out of the team tunnel to the planting site and while the guards are digging them in, they try to drop the stone so some record of their identity remains. You can find them hidden among the roots if you look. The names of the disappeared. Come. See.’

In the crook of a tree branch was white glass cobble. Black charcoal cursive, much eroded by wind and rain, a name. A history. An identity. I Am. I Was. Remember Me.

‘Sometimes they do not drop it in time and the stone remains embedded. It will not work on stone, you see. Nor teeth. Did you know that? At the centre of every man-tree are two sets of teeth; intact, perfect, entombed in the wood. There is an image in that but I do not know exactly what to do with it. If I can even do justice to it.’

Mathembe judged him to be maybe ten, maybe twelve years her senior, yet in his manner, his way of speaking, of using his large, useless hands, was a naive unworldliness that seemed almost childish.

‘I see it as an allegory. But then she used to say I saw everything as an allegory. An allegory frightening in its implications: if the teeth are intact, might not the spirit be also? Trapped inside. Entombed in wood, blind, deaf, dumb, insensible. Alive and aware and conscious, but unable to get out. And we would never know. How could we know? How could they communicate anything to us? Stop it Ghavra, you are frightening yourself. Overactive imagination. She used to tell me that all the time, I have an overactive imagination. I am sorry, did I frighten you too? I am sorry. Well, goodbye. I hope and I do not hope you find what you are looking for. This place engenders mixed blessings like that.’

They parted, moving in opposite directions along opposite rows. Mathembe searched for white stones with a name on them until the sky grew dark and the banks of floodlights came on panel by panel, pouring white light down into Bujumbura Ballpark.

He was there the next day, passing up a row as Mathembe was passing down. After that she did not see him for three more days. By then she was conscious that she was searching not just for the white stones, but for his shadow in her peripheral vision. The fifth day she met him at the tram halt and was surprised by the thrill she felt when he remembered her. That day they worked together under the high, distant beating of helicopter rotors, along the ranks of condemned prisoners.

Ghavra. A Proclaimer name. Ghavra was a poet. Not any poet, but a jangada poet. Not any jangada poet, but a political jangada poet. Not any political jangada poet, but a Proclaimer jangada poet. Mathembe knew of jangada poets from Faradje’s radio. Mathembe knew of jangada poets from Faradje’s reaction to Faradje’s radio. The first soft slap of drums, the slink of guitars, the plink of thumb-pianos and, with an uncharacteristic blaze of anger, he would be out of his sagging chair, retuning the station. ‘Damned ocarinas!’ he would swear. Never having heard more than two bars of introduction, Mathembe could not say if the accusation was justified or not.

Jangada: blank verse ecstatically improvised to music. The river-shanty people conceived it from poverty and want, gave birth to it down in the boondocks among the drums and surdus and tablas with which the longshoremen accompanied their never-ending song, found in the rhythm of the angels and the hallucinatory poetry a communal apotheosis. But it was in the hands of the middle-class dilettantes—the usurpers and perverters of all such clay-footed media—that it gained the same kind of raw intellectual respectability that Ghost-Boy graffiti on municipal trams and trux had earned a season, a year, before. Jangada was in grave danger of becoming a fashion. Any growing thing that loses its roots withers: a truth the strolling wajangada moving from street café to street café along the Corniche and Riverside Drive, flattering the tourists in verse for small change, small beer, seemed either to have forgotten, or conveniently misplaced. The advent of political jangada claimed to have come to liberate the music from the grip of the bourgeoisie and restore it to its noble plebeian origins as the song of the oppressed. These new wajangada performed by bioluminescence and trash-light on street corners, at tram drivers’ cafés and longshoremen’s bars and the river-shanty people scratched their heads and shrugged their shoulders so at what fine words like nation and liberty and martyrdom and the cause had to do with them.

Faradje reserved his most biting invective for political jangada. He saw hearts-and-bones Nationalism, the essential naive political heart of the people, bowdlerised, bastardised and sanitised for their protection by namby-pamby arty-farty, and probably sexually deviated intellectuals. The notion of a Proclaimer political jangada poet was as far beyond his comprehension as the metaphysical underpinnings of ur-space.

Mathembe saw no contradiction. A man could be a jangada poet, and a Nationalist, and a Proclaimer, and a daily searcher for white stones among the roots and branches of Bujumbura Ballpark: the true world, the world she had glimpsed that time with Dr Kalimuni, was a big house, with shelter for many under its eaves. In the enervating heat of an Ol Tok high summer, they worked their ways along the aisles of the trees. In the shade of the branches, he told her about the one for whom he was searching. She had worked for an organisation called the Glass House. Had she heard of it? No. Not many had. Had she then heard of the National Cultural League? She had: a vague gossamer umbrella, beautifully coloured, beneath which an uncomfortable alliance of painters, writers, artists, musicians, university professors, eccentric widows with too many pets, serious students and well-intentioned but clueless foreigners congregated with the common aim of promoting the uniqueness of their national heritage. It rated scant credibility in the tunnels of Flesh Market, did the National Cultural League. The Glass House was a semi-autonomous bud of the League, a project of young activists committed to iterating Nationalist thought through the contemporary street arts, transforming them into potent tools of political expression. Before the Glass House, Ghavra had been just another poet publishing an anaemic volume of verse every few years or so, hopelessly abstracted, touching nothing, changing nothing. Then one night as he lay on his bed wrestling with his artistic impotence, voices had gathered in the square below his window. He had rushed to the balcony to see what was happening and the wild wild words and soaring chordal dance oijangada had struck him like a physical blow. Everything changed, changed utterly: terribly, beautifully. He had given his spirit to this consuming, passionate new poetry and almost without thought had been swept along by dancing feet into a heady whirl of music, hallucination and politics. The tide had inevitably carried him to the Glass House even as the Glass House pushed towards the explosive popularity of the new music. And there he had met her. She had been a local organiser. Slowly, shyly, they had fallen in love. They had lived together in an apartment on Kimathi Street for a season and a half, a timeless pre-creation Dreamtime in which their similarities and disparities had ignited each other with such brilliance that those who drew close to them were dazzled.

And then she was evaporated.

‘That is the word,’ he said. ‘Evaporated. You are not arrested, you are not interned, you are not helping the police with their inquiries: you are evaporated. They have given the verb a new, transitive form. Not a word. Not a sign. Not a trace. No letters, no communiqués, no legal representation. Official silence, neither confirmation nor denial. Evaporated.

‘One evening she did not come back from the Glass House. That was all. I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and she never came. No one saw anything, No one knew anything. Evaporated.’

Later, when he was able, he asked Mathembe his first and only direct question. It was: ‘And you?’

Mathembe found a piece of paper and the pencil stub she kept for adding up things in her belt pouch, wrote one word: Father. Ghavra nodded and never again was Mathembe’s wordlessness questioned. They searched on but neither found what they were looking for. At the tram halt he said to her, ‘You know who I am, but I do not know who you are.’

Mathembe she wrote in her fat, ugly ideograms, like spoiled children. She pressed the note into his hand and ran madly for her tram, bells ringing.

When she was little more than an apple, her Grandfather, with the mandatory grandfatherly glee for the distasteful, had shown Mathembe one of the bandana-coloured slugs that were such a pest in Chepsenyt’s garden orchards. The story went that they were the descendants of scraps of bioplasm lost down the backs of chairs, in corners, under beds; rolled and shaped by the rough hands of evolution. Mathembe had grimaced as her Grandfather had lifted the gross, gaudy thing, long as his hand, muscular and vital as an extra organ, and held it for her perusal. A forefinger was raised to the corner of his eye, a single tear squeezed onto fingertip. He brought the single tear toward the slug’s waving tricorn of horns. The horns retracted with un-slug-like speed: the whole ghastly blob oozed way from the finger.

‘Salt in the tears,’ her Grandfather had said. ‘They cannot tolerate salt. If you cry on them, they dissolve and die.’

She was a slug, a slow-moving, conspicuous, cumbersome slug, her horns reaching out, questing, testing. Do you feel as I feel? Am I silly and stupid? Is it real? Should this be right? Stinging, salty questions. Do not rain tears on me, because I might dissolve. She had desired her world opened up, unpeeled like fruit, but not this way. Lady of the Holographic Mercies, not this way.

When business was slow, slow as a slug or when the wind from deep under the quarter stirred her spirituality, Mathembe would tend the shrine next door. She scooped up incense ash and tidied away burned-out cones. She piled dead dark bioluminescents into a recycle sack and polished the rare metals. She swept up the litter and evicted any vagrant parasitic organs that crept in during the night to feed off the biolights. She removed out-of-date prayers from their wands, made sure there was a supply of paper slips, and something with which to write on them. She never saw anyone make use of her provisions for the spirit, but the fact that every day there was something to do at the shrine testified that it was being used. The small disciplines became a walk of faith for Mathembe: faith not in Zanzan Bé and his attendant sub-saints and angels, but in her own personal celestial patroness. When she became familiar enough with the nature of faith to know that Zanzan Bé would not mind—as a Ykondé Saint (the highest spiritual state achievable by humans short of divinity) he was incapable of jealousy—she built a small sub-shrine for the Five Hearts Beer Girl out of interlocking sections of plasm. The stuff multiplied faster than she could sell it. Over the weeks the shrine grew into an elaborate, disturbing pagoda of smooth black plastic skin stretched over bulging ribs and bone buttresses, of phallic knobs, puckered lips and throbbing organs that dwarfed the original shrine and turned the attention of the passers-by. Mathembe decked her shrine with biolights, candles and whatever ornaments she found clinging to her sticky fingers as she moved through the streets of Ol Tok.

There are moments, only moments, when the sun penetrates the juttings and pilings of Gangerabili into the streets of Flesh Market; moments when rays of dusty sunlight strike like lasers laying open to the light places long lain in darkness, illuminating hidden inviting doorways, entrances to whole undiscovered realms of personal geography. Placeless places, timeless moments.

The light is warm, dusty as an old kiss on her cheek. She stands before the shrine, closes her eyes, claps her hands three times. Behind her the people throng through the streaming light, sunwarmed, illuminated, casting new, curious shadows. To her they are no more substantial than those curious shadows. The sound of their feet, their voices, their music, their commerce and passage, is silence to her. Three times three she claps her hands. Brings palms together.

You have helped me make it, help me keep making it.

My Mother. There is something not right with her. I do not know what it is. No one but her knows what it is and she will not say. Help me help her when she does not want to be helped.

My brother: keep him safe, keep him out of the fingers of stupid little boys, let not his stupidity be compounded, stupidity upon stupidity; keep him safe.

My Father…

The biolight is placed in its niche. The warmth of her fingers stimulates it into activity. As the beam of sunlight falters, regains a final quantum of strength before the terminal fade into the penumbra, the shrine glows, a captive constellation. A thousand lights. A thousand prayers.

The moment dissolves. The spirit passes. Time and space reassert themselves.

She bowed, turned. And he was there. Leaning against the wall of the Tipsi Café, arms folded.

She was furious. She was humiliated. She felt like a vile, bandana-coloured slug.

A light glowed in the fingers of his left hand. A cold, green light. He came to her side. He bowed, clapped his hands, three times three. He placed the biolight on the tabernacle.

‘We cannot ask things of our God, as you can of yours,’ he said. The humiliation, the self-consciousness, was burned away like low river mist. Suddenly everything was good. She wanted to give him things, buy him things, show him things, share things with him. She pushed him into the Tipsi Café, waved at the bottles racked behind A Dose of Worms. On the television high on its perch an international sports team was being presented to the Emperor in his Jade City. Grandfather’s head was muttering and protesting at a tableful of fellow political bums.

‘You are welcome to my café to have whatever you wish any time you want, girlie,’ said A Dose of Worms. ‘If you come without your friend here.’

Mathembe banged her fist on the counter.

‘As I said, you are welcome any time, but without your friend here.’

Again, fist hammered counter, palm opened, upward: why?

‘Tell him, next time he wants to pray at one of our shrines, to one of our saints, to put the light on with his right hand.’

Mathembe bared her teeth and with one gesture swept small eats glasses tea bowls to the floor.

He caught up with her in a small cobbled plaza deep within the inner labyrinth where many ways met around an overgrown public drinking fountain, much graffitied by the lovers that met there.

‘I am used to it. It only stings for a moment and it is gone.’

But I am ashamed she tried to say to him but he was blind to her.

‘If I am angry, it is not for myself, not on account of any insult to myself. I am a poet, insults are the stuff of my sinews. No, I am angry because of the sheer, bloody, stupid ignorance. A thousand years of ignorance.’

Ashamed, she said. And angry. My own people. He did not hear.

‘Ignorance. That is the true enemy. Not Proclaimers, not Confessors, not the Emperor nor the Warriors of Destiny. Ignorance—the ignorance we have been kept in, kept ourselves in, wallowed in—so that we could never get our heads above hating each other to see the real issues. Ignorance. Left hand. Right hand. Shit.’

He took a pen from a pocket. With his left hand, his Proclaimer hand, he wrote among the so-and-so loves so-and-so and the scribbled telecomm codes the words Ourselves Alone: our day will come. He tossed the thick pen in the air, caught with his right hand, the Confessor hand, wrote beside the first message; What we have we hold. A Proclaimer land for a Proclaimer people.

They walked on through the lanes and alleys of the slum, through the pressing people, the eternal people. Where a single vertical shaft struck down through Gangerabili’s many levels to illuminate a quiet corner of a busy concourse they stopped. They stood, close, embedded in light. She wanted to speak. For the first time, there were words worth her saying. He looked up into the light, squinting, striving for one shard of perfect sky. Mathembe took a tiny, jewel-like winged creature from her toy-pouch, ran a pin through its belly, fastened it to Ghavra’s left cuff.

His reaction was one of shock. Rapidly suppressed shock. But shock. He studied the squirming toy with barely disguised revulsion.

‘This is the thing I can never come to understand. A place I can approach but never enter and because I cannot enter, I am forced to confront my own ignorance. The way you people handle life, so ruthlessly so carelessly.

‘I think I am so clever, I am told I am so clever, so tolerant and understanding, I am an artist, able to sympathise and empathise with any and every point of view, be all things to all men in the name of Nationalism, and then I look down and I see a beautiful living thing pinned and writhing on my sleeve and the old Proclaimer in me kicks. I see your gift, and somewhere Spirit Lodge drums beat and banners wave.’ His fingers moved to pull the pin. The creature fluttered its gossamer wings and he shrank back as if a demon were drinking from his veins. ‘I come from a very straight, very staunch Proclaimer family, up in the far North, in Simsharra Prefecture. My township was Faharj, under the breath of the great north woods themselves. The further from the river, the louder they beat the drums, that is a Proclaimer saying. They beat them loud in Faharj, and long. They would have beat them all day, if they could, though there was no Confessor within a day’s drive to hear them. Tabernacle every holy day, daily instruction every day after school from the shrine-keeper, nothing but New Speech and the radio tuned to the Voice of the Empire. Do not play with Confessors, they are dirty, nasty, they tell lies and kick you when you are hurting where it will hurt most and then steal your smartcard: that was what my parents taught me. Dear, dear people. I loved them dearly. Can you understand how?

‘So, when I met my first Confessor, I did not even recognise him. No talons. No green face, no fumes pouring from his nostrils, no red hair, no blue eyes, no cloven feet.’

They moved to a small trough fed with water from a pair of ossified jaws. Water plants released a pleasing perfume. They sat on the rim. Mathembe trailed fingers in the cool cool water.

‘Education was highly esteemed among my people. The old kind; what they called Proclaimer learning. Not sticking circuitry into your skull and having your head filled full of facts while you sleep. Learning: understanding, knowing what to do with those facts, what they mean: thinking. “Learn,” they said, my parents. “Education is the great gift of God.” But they never understood the essential paradox, that by insisting upon the holiness of learning, thinking, they led me to ultimately reject every other value they held so dear.

‘Or; perhaps not.’ Again, his fingers approached the impaled organical. They could not touch it. ‘They were strict interpretation Radanta sect. You probably do not understand what that means. In Radanta, life is the essence and image of God who is the source and centre of all sentience and being, its master, controller, and ultimate shaper. To take life, genetic material which is the source and seed of life, and manipulate it, adapt it to serve the purpose of man is, in their theology, a sin of monumental pride. Faharj was a predominantly Radanta township; my people tried to lead lives that respected and reverenced life. Biotechnology was anathema. Outlawed. A social obscenity.

‘To socially ostracise biotechnology was an oddity even among northern Proclaimers. My parents saw it rather that those other Proclaimer sects had compromised and adulterated the revealing science of God and fallen irredeemably from grace. They were farmers—it is kind of a necessity among the Radanta; they do not permit themselves biotectured food. They cultivated the soil the way they did ten thousand years ago in the Grey Age; opening the earth with metal ploughs hauled by machines, sowing—plain, simple staples; no meat plants, no milk plants, no wineries. Everything plain, raw, simple. Dirty. They killed, and ate animals.

‘I was born and grew up in a dead house of bricks and stones and sheet plastic on a dead street of stone and concrete. Dead houses lit and powered by electricity made from running water and moving air, not biogas, not solar plants. Where we went in the world we walked, or rode big, clanking bicycles. If we had far to go, to relatives in another town, we would go in metal trailers towed by metal tractors. I went about the world clad in cloth spun and woven by machines, not skimmed from the surface of vats of bacteria.

‘When I sickened, I was given chemicals. No healing viruses to restore my inner man to harmony. And if I died in my sickness, I would have been buried in the earth, standing upright before the presence of God. No root-dream of an afterlife for me, only a sad, slow rotting into the cold, pressing earth. The Dreaming was the unforgivable blasphemy, that man should deny the God-given gift of mortality and death. But as a Radantist, I would go joyfully to my grave, filled with faith and hope.’

Mathembe shivered, the cold wind of mortality abroad in the lanes of Gangerabili. A death that was death; brittle lives suspended over an abyss with nothing to hold them, nothing to catch them should they be shattered and fall sparkling into the dark. She thought of Dr Kalimuni, how brave he had been against the weapons of the Warriors of Destiny. Now that she saw the darkness that overshadowed his and the life of every Proclaimer, she caught the true measure of that bravery.

‘Can you understand how a thing may be rich in its simplicity? It is only now, after years of self-humiliation and loathing, of despising my parent’s faith, that I have come to treasure my childhood. It is an indissoluble part of me, I cannot wish it away, therefore, I shall rejoice in it, take joy from it, even if, at the time, I wished to escape from it without one second’s delay. I was an educated fool, clever enough to see the shortcomings of my life and world, but without the wisdom to appreciate them. My first act of rebellion was when my father and mother wanted to induct me into a Spirit Lodge—the Seed of Tears Society, I was born under the aspect of the Ninth House—and I refused. There had never been a scandal the like. Prayer-callers were summoned, shrine-keepers, elders, moderators; they all took turns to talk to me: very slowly, very loudly, as if my problem was deafness, not rebellion. I said the Lodges were bitter and narrow and intolerant; hatred of Confessors masquerading as religious virtue: I would not relent, I would not join. My mother stopped up her ears with wax so she would not have to hear such blasphemies: my father has not spoken to me since, not one word. Of course, I was Named before the congregation—my infamy spread even to the corrupt Proclaimers, as I had been taught to think of them. Had I been a Confessor, I might have been better treated. Only my mother and the official delegations from the shrine would speak to me. I was not being formally Shunned, they told me: I failed to appreciate the honour. I wished then they would have, if I was a sinner, then let my sins abound, let them multiply; but I realise now the elders drew short of Shunning not for me, but for the sake of my family.

‘I am sure the whole town sighed with relief when I left for the university to curse myself with education. I am glad that none of them ever sought to make contact with me there; the repercussions for my mother and father of a good Proclaimer boy abandoning the faith of his fathers and, in his darkness and doubt, turning to the evils of Nationalism would have been terrible indeed. The Lodges are powerful, and vengeful. The burden of sin must be placed somewhere and they are not particular where they put it.

‘Now you know. I am a Proclaimer and a Nationalist. So why, in the name of that Nationalism, do I find myself playing advocate for Proclaimerism? Perhaps it is that I disprove the formula that equates Confessor with Nationalist and Proclaimer with Imperialist. Perhaps because a thousand years of Proclaimer presence in this land, Proclaimer thought, Proclaimer faith, Proclaimer society and language and music and art and literature and culture cannot be written off and dismissed as an aberration of history. Proclaimerism is part of this land: the land has taken it, as it has taken everything else, and changed it, and shaped it, and moulded it into something uniquely its own. The faith of my fathers is not the faith of the fathers across the River. This is as much my land as your land, as much my land as the Warriors of Destiny’s, or the Ourselves Alone Councillors starving in a courtyard somewhere; my land and I love it, all of it; not part of it, not corners of it, not partially. Confessors and Proclaimers.

‘I am sorry. I am sorry. I get excited. And loud. And embarrassing.’ He spread his big, useless hands.

No. Mathembe said, be embarrassing, be loud, show me this greater nation of yours. But the spirits, having flown, would not return in that place, at that time, again. His fingers finally reached the now-quiet toy, touched the synthetic flesh.

‘Oh, we think we are so sophisticated, so astute in our political smartness, and then a little scrap of flesh, a toy, something alive one day, dead the next, and it is Ghost Boys and Spirit Lodges again. Always more to unlearn than learn. Thank you.’ He stroked the gift, it fluttered translucent wings. ‘This is more than a toy, this is a test, a trial. An understanding machine.’

No it is not, Mathembe said. It is a toy. A nothing. A few grammes of bioplasm, plastic flesh sung into life by me, for you, as a gift. No more.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘You have shown me where and how you work, now I must show you where and how I work.’

The Glass House filled most of a small but bright plaza in Tsirinana. By design or by accident, some biotectural anomaly had caused the slumping slag-pile of a dying houseblock to blister out into huge transparent bubbles, like clusters of ripe fruit, each many times human height. Walls had been pierced, connections made, floors and decks laid, power and telecomm conduits run all over like a nervous system, furnishings and office equipment moved in along with the requisite personnel. People in Glass Houses need to look busy.

One final detail. At some time while the Glass House was being blown, a photochemical reaction had turned the polymer pink. Quite pink.

‘After a while you stop noticing it,’ Ghavra said as pink light fell on pink desks, pink chairs, pink terminals, pink papers pink posters pink pamphlets. Mathembe watched the people with pink smiles on their pink teeth as they hurried past Ghavra busy busy on their busy-nesses in the name of Art and Nationalism.

‘All acts are, can be, political acts if they are conceived as such and informed by a set of culturally sound values,’ Ghavra said but the words did not convince Mathembe. She sensed that they did not convince Ghavra either; and more: that the Glass House’s ground-breaking work in making every act from wine-drinking to street-ball to graffiti a political act had left him isolated, one Proclaimer political jangada poet, an oddity, an anachronism, an embarrassment, like the too-old child who still plays with the four-year-olds. When Ghavra suggested they leave she was glad for them both. While they walked he talked about how once you knew the signs you found infections of Imperial culture in every part of life, but Mathembe did not take in a word. She had become aware of a curious optical phenomenon. At first she had thought it was a trick of the light in an unfamiliar quarter, but no, everywhere she turned her head, there it was, posters, news-pillars, scraps of paper in the gutter, the white cobbles beneath her feet, laundry billowing from the balconies above her, even the white cumuli passing ponderously above her; all were tinged with a slight but definite greenness. Ghavra noticed her attempts to rub the green out of her eyes.

‘Negative after-images.’ Uneducated Mathembe did not understand. ‘It used to baffle me too until it was explained to me. The pink light, you see. The eye adjusts, and then when it is back on the street, everything is shifted that little bit in compensation. It passes.’

It was three days before the last photon of green was gone from Mathembe’s vision and white was plain and sacred white again.

That was the where. This is the how.

Bad day.

No luck.

No money.

Bad temper.

Empty bowl.

Empty cardreader.

No sale.

Hands in pockets.

Kicking boots against wall. Kick. Kick.

Bored. Cross. Poor.

And the previous night the advocate Sharjah had come with his correct smile, so, and his soothing soothing words, so, about how he was certain, certain that news would be forthcoming very soon, and the best possible news imaginable and Mathembe had not the courage to tell her Mother, sitting there like some storm-blasted bird, hands on knees, terribly, frighteningly, inexplicably sick, mortal, fallible; that in her faithlessness she had been to Bujumbura Ballpark ten, fifteen, twenty times but her Mother had looked so sick, so desperately sick, and the Advocate’s words had been so soothing, so healing to her, that she could not drive such a needle of pain into her heart, however truthful. We all must make an effort for the Advocate Sharjah, her Mother had said and here she was today bored cross poor.

Beggars would do better. Better off eyeless handless legless earless mouthless everythingless. Not one half-scared, half-thrilled tourist penetrating into darkest Gangerabili, not one wrinkle-nosed socialite, not one boyfriend/girlfriend buying for girlfriend/boyfriend.

Nothing.

Whisper the word of unlocking, roll them back into a ball, stuff the ball into your pouch and tomorrow is another day.

And then he came. Smiling. Cocky. Arms folded, leaning against the posters for concerts and rallies and sales. Smiling. Cocky. Damn him.

‘Come,’ he said. But she was still angry.

‘Come,’ he said again and reached his hand across the alley to her.

‘Come,’ a third time and she took the offered hand and something like a small shock of excitement ran from his fingers into hers and while she was still trying to puzzle out what it was he had pulled her away from the dull dirty dispiriting day come through the alleys between the stalls and booths and the vendors calling and the blaring banal radios and the blue television tubes come out into the air under the open sky, breaking into a run now come come blinking in the unaccustomed light, early evening light falling in planes and shafts across Ol Tok come hunting now, running with a clear sense of call, of purpose, of direction, two bright motes of life and movement weaving their own course along crowded sidewalks between street café tables around newspillars dodging policepersons army patrols great growling troop carriers darting across boulevards gnashing with traffic come come come the spirit was kindled within her seizing her up in a vertigo of excitement and anticipation of the miraculous come come come through streets broad and streets narrow where the air tasted of deep deep waters, cool cool river, away from the familiar districts and boros, linked hands a conduit of energy between them come come the fast-settling night of these southern skies was pouring through the streets, behind their heels the city broke into lights, district by district, boro by boro but they outraced light itself and she laughed aloud giddy with the brilliance of her passage come and with the first stars penetrating the indigo, musk-and-river-water-scented skies, they burst out of the stifling embrace of alleyways onto the Corniche and the river was wide as the sea before them, dappled with the riding lights of riverboats, silvered with starlight reflections.

There they waited for them, the musicians, the wajangada, women with drums slung at their waists from black green and silver sashes; men bent over guitars, tuning, testing, frowning with concentration, people with metal piston rings from the engines of dead Empire-built automobiles and ten-centimetre steel nails to strike them with; people with tambourines and maracas and wooden claves and surdus and congas and tablas and things you beat and things you scraped and things you ran your finger along and out poured a cascade of sound like the flight of angels.

‘Jangada!’ shouted Ghavra and his face was exultant.

‘Jangada!’ shouted the people and, hands still joined, Ghavra presented Mathembe (suddenly shy, suddenly self-conscious) and shouted, ‘My friend, Mathembe here, has always wondered what jangada is about. Tonight, I propose we show her.’

‘Mathembe,’ said the guitarists and the drummers and the beaters and scrapers in a roll of voices like thunder across the river. ‘Mathembe.’ A drum struck up, the simple two: four rhythm of a tabla. Ghavra stood legs apart, head back, fingers locked behind his head. His foot tapped to the rhythm. The musicians moved into a semicircle behind him, standing, squatting, kneeling according to their instruments.

The voice of the single drum called. And the people came to its calling. From their tenements and housing projects, from the houses on the heights and the river bluffs, from their pontoon towns and houseboats; pilgrims from the riversteps swathed in white, shoulders ritually bare, water dripping from their hair, teenagers ruminating wunder-gum and dressed in shorts, teeshirts and jackets with the Ship-Captain printed on the back, serious young men and women with Ourselves Alone badges and Warriors of Destiny scarves around their necks and ‘I ♥ the Nationalist Prisoners of War’ stickers on their lapels, mothers with infants jigging their little ones up and down in time to the drum dance dance little one, fathers with flagons of wine and stolid you-will-not-get-me-dancing faces and silly old men and women prancing with each other, in and out, over and under, roaring with laughter, too old for silly pride.

Jangada!

Then out of the night came the song of a single guitar, a simple theme but subtle, counterpointed by a second guitar, and then between the end of one beat and the beginning of the next in came the bass and rhythm and it lifted you up so high that it took your breath away, so wonderful that you wished they would go back and do it again because next time it might just make you cry with wonder.

Jangada. The people dance the musicians bend and sweat and flash knowledgeable brilliant smiles at each other. Jangada, all is rhythm and movement, a dozen tempos pulling in a dozen different directions creating a fabric of continuity that exists only because of their tension; all is movement, all is dancing. One point of stillness only: Ghavra, the Proclaimer, standing still, legs apart, hands clasped behind neck, head back looking in the dark sky so full of stars and saints. Upon what spirits might a Proclaimer, cursed to live, scared of dying, call?

But whatever their names, they hear his call and answer him. Slowly, very slowly, he folds himself down into a tight curled ball, tight as a fist before the blow is struck. Mathembe wants to go to him, is this part of it, is that meant to happen? it must be, because the musicians are playing and the people are dancing and waving their flagons of wine and their green black and silver scarves. Is it only Mathembe who can see that he is suffering? She must go to him, she cannot hold back any longer and as the decision is made, Ghavra straightens up. As he is half-uncurled, a wail breaks free from him like no sound Mathembe has ever heard before, like the wail God might make if he were to call his faithful Proclaimers to prayer across the depths of space. The wail grows greater, louder as he draws himself upright; jangada on the radio was never like this, jangada on the radio never released the ancient animal sleeping curled beneath the brain, jangada on the radio never shook you with its ancient primal fears. The musicians stop, waiting, sensing, counting time. The wail breaks into a torrent of language and the players scoop up the rhythm with drums and guitars and in an instant it is Mathembe who is lifted up on the stream of improvisation. This, this, is indeed how it is meant to happen.

They are about a river, Ghavra’s words, and because they are about a river, they are like a river; a river which is many things, cool cool waters deeper than remembering, a spiritual state, a pilgrimage, the flood of history across time, the never-ending song of language, the iteration of the universe to itself through the tongues of men, associations, allusions tumbling over each other in the splash and run of his words. The expression on his face—pain, rapture, confusion, pride—is the apologia of his faith: that all men can—indeed, this one man may have—become God. True his face says. True. Words and music flow together and run onward into the night, trux and automobiles are stopping along the Corniche, everything shifting everything flowing everything changing like pilgrims lifting handfuls of holy water from the river that runs away through their fingers the moment they claim hold of it. No man can own a river, only borrow it and let it flow on.

So high. So holy.

Too high. Too holy, Mathembe realises. Uncertainty fills the dance, the people pause, stop, stare. What is he saying? What does it mean? What has this to do with our lives, our hopes, our land? Step by step, the dance dies, killed by incomprehension. But Mathembe wills him on, on burn on, burn on, Ghavra; they would lime and cage you, make you sing their songs, do you not realise that this is why they look at you with suspicion in the Glass House, this is the insincerity behind their plastic pink smiles? The angel that inspires you will not submit to their rule and they would leave their greasy fingerprints on the insides of its perfect thighs. You are no Proclaimer political jangada poet, you are greater than that.

A voice cried out. A teenage girl, hair plaited into greased ropes, Ship-Captain-jacketed, pointed at the sky.

‘Look! Look!’

The musicians hesitated, lost the beat, fell apart into mismatched rhythms.

‘The sky! The sky!’

And Ghavra, in mid-flight, failed. Big useless hands clawed the air for the fleeing words.

‘Look! The sky!’

An entire constellation was on the move. Lights drifted from their ordained positions and fell away towards the horizon. Beams flickered across heaven and were answered by beams lancing up from beyond the westward edge of the planet. The soft red moon and the hard silver star of the Saint-ship hung at the zenith.

And it was day. A new sun shone at the noontime. Alien light fell across the night half of the planet. Birds rose from the river with a collective cry and thunder of wings, wheeled, squawling, above the Corniche while the nocturnal voice of the city was unnaturally hushed. The people gazed wondering at the light of another sun a quarter of a universe way.

And it was night.

The soft red moon and the hard silver star were gone.

The girl with the plaited hair, in the Ship-Captain jacket, was crying.

Here is another Old Speech word for you to learn. You have already mastered wajangada: ‘the jangada people’. Now we will say together the word wakinéma. Say it like this: Wah. Kee. Neh. Ma. Try it on your tongue, roll it around, try it for size and shape. Wakinéma. Is it comfortable? Does it sit well on your lips? That is good. Perhaps you might try now, having learned a little Old Speech, to guess what it means? Wa, people, a plural personal prefix used to transform a noun into a vocation. Kinéma. A noun, derived from an ancient word for motion. Wakinéma: the moving picture people.

Wakinéma: it ran like a rumour of a new season along the cobbles, up the tangles of conduits and pipes, from balcony to balcony, a disease of excitement that passed mouth to mouth to mouth.

Wakinéma. Where? Here? Lantern Lane?

Wakinéma. Yes. Here. Lantern Lane. Soon. How soon? Next month? Next week? Two days. Two days?

Wakinéma. What will they be showing? I do not know. But it will be good. It will be great.

Wakinéma. Tonight! Tonight tonight tonight. This is the night, this is the place, we are the people. Got chairs? Yes. Got beer? Yes. Got things to eat? Yes. Got friends, family, all coming? Yes.

No liberating Messiah at the head of ten thousand armoured trux, no palanquin manhandled through the streets enshrining the relics of a saint was ever greeted with the unforced enthusiasm with which the children of Lantern Lane celebrated the arrival of the wakinéma. Their trux were tired and listless, long overdue the flesh buyers’ poleaxes; the fine paintwork on their wooden trailers, once bold, once gaudy, was now faded and scabbed. The wakinéma themselves were greasy-haired, parasite-ridden and dirty but the eye of faith has no regard for such things. The children followed them around in small adoring flocks as they rigged guy-wires for the big screen, ran out public address systems and readied the projector gantry.

Wakinéma! Tonight! Tonight!

Mathembe heard them at their work as she squatted on her heels by her mother’s bedroom door. It was a pose she had learned from Flesh Market, that squat, the pose of waiting. Enduring. Vigil-keeping.

The burden of mystery of her Mother’s recurrent illness had been handed to Mathembe. It was not a burden she was unwilling to assume, had she been consulted. Her anger was the automatic assumption of her family’s men that sorrow must always be borne by a woman’s shoulders. For a while it had been the concern of them all, that first time when Mrs Fileli had fallen sick and deteriorated with terrifying rapidity and they had all taken their turns waiting by the bedroom door not daring to ask the question: will she die? Healers, medicals, spirit-prayers, herbalists, layers-on-of-hands; all had come and Mrs Fileli, lying in her bed, fingers clutching at the thin sheet like the spirit of famine on a prosperous land, had said: send them away, send them away, I will not speak to them, I will not see them, the only one I will see is the Advocate Sharjah, I will be all right, I do not need them, believe me, send them away, is that the Advocate I hear? and as the sound of the laboured breathing filled the apartment and the healers medicals spirit-prayers herbalists layers-on-of-hands had shaken their heads and said in low murmuring voices Mrs Fileli refuses to see us but maybe if you were to give her this little vial, this little prayer-ticket, this little prescription, this little sachet of tisane this little verse of holy writ…

Then, one morning, she was gone. Gone a whole day. Pushing aside political principles, Faradje was on the verge of telecomming the local police when a jeepney arrived in a blare of horns and radios and clattering up the street stairs came a smiling, bright cheerful woman who looked in every way like Mrs Fileli except that she was not ghastly, luminous rotting in the bed from which no one had ever truly believed she would rise again.

‘Yes?’ said Mathembe’s Mother. When asked how she felt she replied testily that she felt fine. Fine. Why should she not? ‘I think, maybe, it would be good for us all to go out tonight as a family for dinner. We do not get out enough, together, as a family. I saw a little place today, not too expensive, down in the Vintners’ Quarter…’

She was the only one who enjoyed her dinner in the cheap small restaurant on Winetavern Street. And the dinners of those who found themselves without an appetite. ‘You not eating that? Give it here, I have a hunger on me like a forest fire. I do not know why I should be so ravenous, but I am. Pass the hot sauce.’

The next day she took son, daughter, brother and father-in-law to the Water Gardens. Troupes of musicians perched precariously on gondolas paused to serenade them in their canal-side pavilion while Mrs Fileli took tea and everyone else’s share of sweet and dainty eats. She rose to throw a handful of change to the musicians, suddenly tottered. She fell in a clatter of chairs china change.

‘Leave me alone leave me alone leave me alone,’ she swore at the hands that moved to help. ‘I am all right, I tell you. There is nothing the matter with me.’

Within three days she had retreated to her bed again. Faradje despatched Mathembe and Hradu with a sizeable sum of money down to Drug Market to shop among the vials of cut-and-mix bacteria, the quasi-legal viruses, the precious medicaments from the genetic arks of the primal forests—known as the Footstep Forests for myth had it they sprang from the footsteps of the Ahleles—for something, something that might help. Costly treatments. Many days’ wages. Mathembe found the empty vials on the back balcony. Sprinkled as a libation upon the shit-digesters.

‘Is that the Advocate Sharjah?’ her mother would cry at the slightest rattle of the street door. ‘Bring him up bring him up bring him in.’

Then, in the night, she was gone. Again.

Mathembe grasped the sharp blade of responsibility alone. Hers had been the duty of watching and warding by night—though why a watch should be kept no one could say, unless for death coming up the street stairs, and that no one could deny entry. Hard days selling under Gangerabili, hard nights squatting by the door: if her eyes had closed, she would have sworn it could not have been for more than an instant. And the bed was empty.

The transformation was no less disturbing for happening a second time. No family dinner this time. No family outing to the pleasure punts and pavilions of the Water Gardens. But suddenly there was money for an educator for Hradu, who had until then successfully evaded the fingers of responsibility and seemed set on becoming another ignorant Confessor lout hanging around on the street corner for eternity to arrive. Having thoroughly checked the credentials of all the private tutors on Water Street, Mrs Fileli signed Hradu up for courses that would lead to diplomas and certificates. Without diplomas and certificates, one was so much toilet tissue in this eat-your-own-fingers world.

‘I have been to see the Advocate Sharjah,’ she announced at the evening meal around the table under which resided a trux rear stabiliser unit that everyone suspected but no one was prepared to accuse Hradu was keeping for his Ghost-Boy friends. Some great and secret project a-growing in a vat in a disused warehouse over in Ladywell. Under any other circumstances Mathembe would have made the investigation of it her prime concern. Under any other circumstances. ‘Great news. He has found a contact in the Timboroa Regional Detention Centre; the sister-in-law of a cousin of his who is engaged to be partnered to one of the governors of the centre. He is certain, quite certain that news will be forthcoming any week now of the whereabouts of your Father. Is not that great news?’

Great news. Great great news.

She pretended for a week there was nothing wrong with her before the pains, the headaches, the nagging weakness and shivering forced her to her bed again while the sun poured through the window and the smell and sweat of sickness grew unbearable in the airless room. Outside the wakinéma put up their screen and rigged their sound system and had the small boys of the district stuff totally unnecessary flyers in every pigeonhole.

An hour before the edge of the world covered the sun, Lantern Lane was swarming. With distant relatives trammed in from Gobéte and Ashkamurthi Hill. Chairs prodded into a sullen waddle only to dump themselves exactly behind the fat woman with the largest and most bouffant coiffure in the street. Small kids wrapped up in quilts and robes and told if they promised to go straight, straight to bed the moment the final credits rolled—no quibbles, no arguments—they could come and watch. Householders nervously testing the stamina of dubious balconies. Hot-snack and wine concessionaires materialising out of the dirt and litter and dried peeled house-skin in dark doorways. The smell of celluloid. The whines and feed-back wails from the geriatric sound-system. Old people complaining they would not be able to hear it over the traffic noise of the boulevard and that they would get piles sitting out there in the cool cool cool of the evening and they could not see past the fat woman with the dreadful bouffant hair and that if there was any sex, any flesh, any rubbing of parts, or bits, they were not watching that and lurching off to the toilet causing whole waves of spectators to be displaced from their seats. Children screaming for the sake of listening to their own echoes, throwing sweets at each other, farting, singing why are we waiting, whai-ai are we waiting? A cheer went up when the technicians—a greasy-haired bunch of permanent adolescents—found the controls to the Five Hearts beer girl and vanished her, a god unremembered, into limbo. A louder cheer as the projector stuttered to life and the screen lit with an advertisement for Five Hearts Beer.

In the shadows of a dead doorway Mathembe waited, a glitter of eyes. The general hullabaloo died down. The Full Supporting Programme was starting. Halfway through the first reel the street door opened. Wrapped in a smother of coats despite the naked heat of the summer night, Mathembe’s mother ventured onto Lantern Lane, slipping between the tenements and the rows of silver-lit, delighted spectators. A flicker of shadow, Mathembe was behind her. She had guessed right. While Faradje, Hradu, the head gaped at the billowing screen, filled with vast images like half-remembered angels, she had made her move. Mathembe folded herself into a Credit Union doorway while Mrs Fileli waited for a tram. The big street emphasised her fragility. Mathembe wanted to go to her, lift her, carry her home to bed and family and love. The tram arrived. Mrs Fileli took a window seat. Mathembe broke cover, followed on foot. One stop. Two stops. Three stops. Eight stops. Nine stops. Ten stops. Mrs Fileli disembarked, crossed to another line. Mathembe pretended she could read the pro-Imperial flyers pasted to a street-corner newspillar. A tram came swinging into the stop spraying sparks from the catenary wires. Like most of her fellow countrypeople, Mathembe was afraid of electricity. It was the essence of demons wrung out by the mills of the Emperor and tamed just enough to be useful but never enough to be totally trustworthy. Mrs Fileli took the rear seat, swaddled in her coats and wraps. Sweat trickled down Mathembe’s sides as she ran after. Stop by stop, spark by spark, the tram drew nearer to Karasvathi.

Every part of a city has its dark counterpart. As Lantern Lane was to adjacent Keekorok Boulevard, as Gangerabili was to the Corniche sweeping up to the garden parties of Fijjad Hills, so Karasvathi was to Drug Market. Its evil, Siamese, twin.

What a man might seek among Karasvathi’s tortuous walkways and footpaths was no one’s business but his own. A shadow in her hooded sleeveless top and black tights, Mathembe followed her mother through a dark maze of decaying, morbid biotecture where nothing ran straight and nothing ran true, where no line was steady, no perpendicular vertical. The lowest storeys of Karasvathi’s buildings had been so compressed by the burden of millennia of biotecture that the inhabitants—a cowled, furtive race into which Mrs Fileli, cowled, furtive, blended almost invisibly—came and went through knee-high doors under sagging lintels from passages no more than crawlways. Carved wooden shingles decorated the bowed-out walls. A syringe. A brainplant. A head. An elegantly curved wooden phallus. A pair of scales. A five-lobed leaf. Mathembe’s mother ducked into a long dark passage beneath the sign of a snake-haired woman’s head. Doors led off the passage. All closed. All shut. Somewhere close by a deep-voiced musical instrument beat like a heart.

Door one: a flight of shallow steps jogging off into Karasvathi’s interior darkness, rising gently in defiance of planetary curvature until perspective dwindled it to nothing.

Door two: blank wall.

Door three: a penetrating couple. The woman looked pityingly at Mathembe as she ground her hips: around we go, and round.

Door four: something huge and lunging and barking.

Door five: a dead beggar encrusted with ossified parasitic organicals.

Door six: a shop. The head of a snake-haired woman was painted on the floor. Glo-globes floated in the corners. By the left-hand wall an old naked man lay with his back turned to the room. His head was wreathed in pulsing green tendrils, an umbilical looped from his anus through the floor. Against the right wall sat an enormous young man staring enraptured at his left big toe. He was naked except for a pair of shorts with yellow chevrons down each side. Mathembe had never seen such muscles. They were like geological features. The bioboy’s forehead was studded with terminals. Biocircuitry coiled back over each ear and clung with small curved claws to the nape of his neck.

In the far wall was a door.

Beyond the door was the machine.

It stood like a man, the machine. It was black. On shoulders, hips, thighs, forehead grey readouts flick-flickered.

She had heard of these machines; whispers of them, murmurs of them running like vermin through the alleys of Gangerabili. They make all the promises, the guarantees, that it will not hurt you harm you have no after-effects no side-effects no bad reactions. And you take the money. The money is good. The money needs to be good. And they inject you with the stuff; memory viruses, drug antibodies, things they sell out of the back seats of automobiles on the Corniche that you take once and next thing you know they are pulling your body out of the gutter for the organ runners to cut up. But they never tell you, you see. They never tell you because if they told you, no one would do it. The fevers. The sickness that got worse and worse every day until you felt—more, you knew, that you were dying—though how could you die when in your bloodstream were circulating enough black-market antigens to immunise an entire Prefecture? The hallucinations. The sure and certain knowledge that God was peeling your body apart with his fingers, worrying out the very marrow of your soul with his ceramic claws. The terrible terrible things. And then, the appointment down behind the door with the medusa-head in Karasvathi. The appointment with the machine. The machine that sucked away your blood.

Clamped inside the machine was a naked woman. To wrists, shoulders, throat, breasts, groin, inner thighs, ankles were hooked black snake-things, fangs embedded in the flesh. Plastic tubes ran from the heads of the snake organicals, over the head of the man-machine where they were tied in a bundle, down to the molecular filters. The blood flowed over the tiered rafts of gills like water from a fortune fountain where you throw a coin to ensure safe return, or joy in love. At each stage the filters leached out the valuable viruses that had seeded and multiplied in the woman’s bloodstream. The blood dripped from a single needle into a dialyser and was recirculated through the body to absorb more tailored viruses.

In the embrace of the biting snake heads, Mathembe’s Mother opened her eyes, beheld her daughter. In that instant Mathembe would have overturned filter stacks, smashed pumps, processors, crushed grey Imperial logic circuits, but the eyes flicked towards the half-open door in the wall behind her. Mathembe peeped through the crack. In a bright conservatory two men sat at tea. On the low table between them was a pot, a water flask and three vials of sparkling silver somethings. One of the two men was small, rodenty, no more than one would expect at such a trade in such a district. The other was the Advocate Sharjah. He smiled and sipped his tea polite polite as, fired by an anger darker and quieter than she had ever suspected her spirit could harbour, Mathembe ripped her Mother free from the sucking machine.

Blood dripped from the dead, gaping fang-mouths onto the floor.

Blood seeped from the parallel puncture wounds in her Mother’s wrists, shoulders, throat, breasts, groin, inner thighs, ankles.

Mathembe wrapped her Mother in a sheet draped over a chair, thought a moment towards loot and plunder. Thought again. Escape was all. The door to the outer room opened. The giant youth stood grinning. Blue bioluminescence pulsed along the circuitry that encircled his cropped skull. He rested hands on the door frame. You shall not pass. Mathembe glanced behind her. In the conservatory doorway stood the rodenty man with a control unit in his hand. The Advocate Sharjah stood behind him with an expression on his face that was part shame and part sorrow, though neither for the proper reason. Mathembe glanced back to the huge, artificially grinning bioboy. And focused all her dark anger, her passion, her strength into one crushing kick to the balls.

He went down like a toppling tieve tree, Mathembe and her Mother were over him and out into the night before even thought could catch them. By the left-hand wall the old man dreamed out whatever dreams the tendrils gave him. But the deep, slapping bass instrument had stopped playing.

The next morning a letter dictated by Faradje in his best Civil Service New Speech was sent by express baix messenger to the offices of the Advocate Sharjah on Sorrowful Street informing the Advocate Sharjah that his services were dispensed with forthwith, that all monies paid into his accounts would be returned immediately and without question and explaining that, even as he was reading this note, a hand-written transcript of his unlawful practices was being delivered by Mathembe Fileli to the Department of the Fellowship of Advocates on Samtanavya Place.

The note to the Advocate Sharjah was returned that evening by another baix messenger. Seemingly, that very morning the Advocate Sharjah had paid off his staff, emptied out the company accounts, locked the office and disappeared.

‘Understand, kid,’ the head tried to explain. ‘No one is seduced all at once. Even when you are being conned out of your life earnings, you know you are being conned, but you also know that there is nothing you can do about it. At any time you can say no, but at no time are you capable of saying it. Do you understand?’

Mathembe shook her head.

‘Lot to learn about love, granddaughter of mine.’

The boy came tap-tapping at the window in the heat of the heart of an Ol Tok summer night. Thunder growled like night dogs around the gutters; rain punished Ol Tok for its thousand thousand sins.

Tap tap tappy-tap.

‘Hradu.’

Lightning convulsed the city. Far off among the Proclaimer hills, thunder answered.

‘Hradu.’

He crouched on the balcony, fingernails scratching the window. Naked but for a pair of tights hand-decorated with Ykondé symbols in felt marker. Boots laced twice around the ankles. Twin deformities on his back, like amputated wings, were pneutna masks slung across his shoulders.

‘Hradu. Wake up. Tonight. It is ready.’

Hradu needed no waking.

‘Tonight Hradu. Tonight. Get dressed.’

He reached for day clothes. The boy smiled, teeth bright by lightning and hologram-shine.

‘No Hradu.’ He stepped into the room, picked up a pair of Mathembe’s shorts. ‘We are the Tiati Omuwera chapter. We serve the Saint Nyaja Korotindilal herself. She says to us, I am the one who protects you, I am the one keeps you safe, if I will you to be invulnerable you may run naked upon the blades of your enemies and none shall harm you, if I will you to die not all the armour of the Emperor himself shall save you. Some will go naked tonight in love for the Saint Nyaja Korotindilal. But for you, these will be enough.’

The boy was already one leg over the balcony. Rain streamed down his thin body. He held out a pnewna mask.

‘Take it. Wear it. Once you put it on, they cannot stop you. You are under the guidance of the saints.’ The boy slipped on his own mask, swung out over Lantern Lane, arms stretched out behind him, gripping the railing, like a figurehead.

‘Look Hradu. See?’

It filled Lantern Lane like a cancer. Black, wet with rain, highlighted by the oily sheen of its own organic secretions. Blue lightning, many clouds away, glistened along its ribs and spines. The tenements seemed to shy away from it, a gothic pile of black biotech half as tall as Faradje’s balcony. The Ghost Boys stood waiting, rain streaming from their upturned masked faces onto the cobbles. The same violent stance, feet apart, hands relaxed, ready. Some wore shorts, some tights, some had decorated their bodies with spray paint and marker, some were naked.

‘Born from the tank. Now, see how your stabiliser unit plays its part! Come Hradu, come. Tonight!’

And they were gone.

Thunder shook Keekorok like hunted vermin. And Mathembe was awake, eyes wide, staring. Something incomplete. Something gone. Some vital component in her world disconnected.

Hradu.

In a soundless cry she was at the window. She saw the Ghost Boys vault up the flanks of the black battletrux to take positions in cupolas and howdahs. Hands reached down, dragged Hradu into a cockpit rimmed with long ivory tusks. Lantern Lane trembled as the battletrux flexed walls of muscle. Wheels ground over the cobbles.

By the time she hit the street it was an echo of many wheels and Ghost-Boy laughter.

Mathembe looked up at the Five Hearts Beer Girl, backlit by pulses of lightning. One look may be a prayer. She ran into the lightning. Hunting. On the corner of Toloitich Way she paused to finger-comb her rain-soaked hair back across her head. In a lightning-lit doorway a man and a woman were dancing close to the music of guitars and drums from the radio, dancing in the heat and sweat of the night. The woman wore shorts that cut tight into her crotch, a halter top and high heels; the man overalls, jacket and suave hat. Jeepneys splashed past, rain sheeting from the drivers’ plastic rain capes and coolie hats. The black boots ran on, bells ringing.

The eyes of the prostitutes smoking in the rain under café umbrellas along Red Fort watched the girl with the silver bells pass by. Huddled in dark doors, teenage wunder-gum junkies, faces identical with numb anonymity from overabuse, saw a dark figure run through their slomo dreams but did not comprehend. Divinely lit by a videowall advertisement for a ’cross-river banking combine, a naked Jantic eremite, fat and pale as the slugs of Mathembe’s childhood, squatted in the contemplation posture called Two Trees. Seeing Mathembe he raised himself on his hands; smiling beatifically, he squeezed out a seemingly endless turd.

Onward.

Wild neon, chrome and glass and loud loud music: lights glaring, belching evil smokes from its triple exhausts, the streamlined tailfin lowrider pulled alongside to kerb-crawl Mathembe along Penyanamama Street: Proclaimer cocks down from the hills above the Corniche, tuft-hunting along the boulevards in their imported Imperial oil-eater. They crowed and clucked and called lewd invitations and comments about the size of her breasts, ail-too visible through her rain-soaked tee-shirt. Mathembe ran faster. The automobile went up a gear. Mathembe slowed to a walk. The automobile slowed to a crawl. Mathembe stopped. The automobile stopped. Mathembe saw her face reflected in the ten million raindrops that clung to its streamlines. She backed away from the car, hands outspread in beseeching, one cautious ringing step at a time.

Howling and jeering, the boys waved their genitals out of the open windows, then revved off into the rain and the lightning with a squeal of tyres and laughter.

Onward.

Coming out of an off-boulevard lane onto the Bourse, Mathembe ran into an army foot patrol. She and the wet, fair-haired soldiers saw each other in the same blink.

It was the tunnels under Gangerabili, and the policeperson demanding to see her public vending licence.

Mathembe stopped. Mathembe turned around. Mathembe began to walk away.

’Ere, girlie, where you fink you’re goin’?

The distance between them stretched. The short shaved hairs at the back of her neck tingled as if stroked by a lover’s fingers.

’Ere, girlie, you stop when we bloody tell you to stop, roit?

A side street beckoned.

Oi, you, girlie, you bloody well stop or we bloody well blow you away, roit, girlie? Oi! Nah where she gone?

Up. Hand over hand, panting, sweating, shivering with wet and fear, up a tangle of pipes and conduits and vines that clogged the alley mouth, up onto the roof where she huddled knees pressed to chest in the warm acid rain, listening to the voice of the soldiers.

Aw, leave the silly bitch. We got beddah fings a do.

God, God, she prayed in the rain and the summer thunder please what have I done, why can I not hold things together? All I want is to be strong. Please do not let me fail with Hradu the way I failed with my mother.

But that is one prayer no god will answer for gods do not appreciate human strength.

The summer storm cleared to the west. A pale grey morning settled upon Ol Tok. The rain passed. The night ended. Mathembe on her rooftop woke not realising she had slept. She unfolded cold, rain-rusted limbs, leaned over the parapet to take in the miraculous new morning. Close eyes. Breathe in, breathe out, one two three times. She would find him. The city was vast, but she would save him from the terminal folly of the Ghost Boys. The thunder-washed air was clean as virtue, cool and sharp as wine.

The pink people pushing pink papers on pink desks managed to successfully ignore Mathembe Fileli squatting on her heels in the lobby for half a morning. When it became embarrassingly obvious that that dirty, sulky urchin was going to sit there messing up the great work of Nationalism until people stopped ignoring her, some sub-sub-assistant was despatched to take care of her. The clean, well-clothed young woman took the slip of paper with ill-concealed distaste. The calligraphy was execrable.

‘Just one moment please.’ A ruffle through files. ‘There you are.’ Mathembe scrawled the address on her left forearm with a marker she had stolen from a stationer’s stand on Yotananda Drive.

Semi-dressed, less awake, Ghavra’s astonishment at finding Mathembe behind the two-fisted hammering on his door was complex and many-layered. She pushed past him into his apartment. Ghavra closed the door to the sleeping room, directed Mathembe into his under-used kitchen. Jangada poets, political jangada poets, Proclaimer political jangada poets, eat out a lot. He let Mathembe storm out her anger in the room that smelled of burned spices, walk the spirits out of her.

HRADU, Mathembe wrote in her big, silly ideograms on his white tabletop.

‘What about him?’

HELP HIM.

‘What do you mean, help him?’

GHOST BOYS.

‘Is he involved with a chapter?’

She waggled her head, yes, no, sort of.

‘Is he missing from home?’

Yes.

‘Gone off with them?’

Yes.

‘What do you think it is I can do?’

YOU NATIONALIST. KNOW PEOPLE. CONTACTS. POWER.

‘Mathembe, Mathembe, what am I? A poet who loves his country. Who listens to poets who love their country? Power? Contacts? The Ghost Boys are the law now. They are the power in this city. Not a poet. Not a Proclaimer poet.’

GLASS HOUSE.

‘Finished, Mathembe. Obsolete. Bypassed. The people do not want poetry. The people do not want art. The people do not want literature, they do not want a national culture. The people do not even know they have a national culture. The people want to sit in cafés and swill wine and listen to the radio and call themselves an independent nation. That is what the people want.’

Mathembe circled her brother’s name, three times.

‘It has no power, Mathembe. That power belongs to Ourselves Alone now and the Warriors of Destiny. They hold the hearts and the minds and the spirits. They might have the power to control the Ghost Boys. The Glass House? A gaggle of old farts and young intellectuals who have catastrophically lost touch with the surface of the planet. Go to Ourselves Alone. The Glass House cannot help you. I cannot help you.’

The kitchen door opened. A woman entered. She was wrapped in a silk houserobe. She moved in the silky, smooth way of people who are naked beneath luxurious fabric.

‘Ghavra? Love? I heard voices.’

‘It is all right. Eleya, this is the kid I was telling you about. Mathembe Fileli. Mathembe, Eleya. You know. I told you about her, at the Ballpark?’ His eyes shone with naked love. ‘Mathembe, she came back! They released her! Oh God, they released her!’

Mathembe did not hear his words. She saw only the woman; beautiful, tall, clean, full of words and cleverness and skill and talent, beautiful beautiful eyes beautiful beautiful skin beautiful beautiful hair beautiful beautiful hands that minutes before had been touching Ghavra and even now could not keep away from him, resting lightly on his shoulder.

Beautiful beautiful people. Beautiful beautiful smiles.

Mathembe mashed the point of her stolen pen into a mess of splayed black fibre. She threw over the table. She cleared shelves of spice jars herb jars glass tea canisters with a single sweep of her arm.

She ran on. She ran unable to stop for if she did stop she would never move again, pressed into the earth by the gravity of emotions she could handle only at long distance, as if they were hazardous biological waste. She had loved him. He had made her feel like something wild, like something dying and something coming to life. He had never known. In his monolithic self-obsession, he had never suspected. She ran on but she could not outrun the feelings, the feelings that had no one name to describe them but were simultaneously rage and betrayal and humiliation and desire and wanting to kill and wanting to die.

The heat and sweat of the summer night found her in a doorway in a dirty part of town. The last tram had long since crackled into its barn, the last café folded its last table and its umbrella trees closed shut for the night. The first rounds of the nocturnal killing were small, abrupt asterisks of violence punctuating the night. The line between depression and redemption is as fine as that which marks the end of night from the beginning of morning.

‘Lonely? Depressed? Despairing?’

Mathembe wheeled, an angel had called her name. Angel indeed: a glowing face hovered above the sidewalk, tied by a flickering thread of laser to a rooftop projector.

‘Fulfilment can be yours, joy and peace, yours, through the power of the Lord Siyaya Siyananga.’ The holographic face filled into a homunculus, a child, naked but for a bejewelled G-string, odiously obese, seated cross-legged on the air. A many-tiered crown rotated above his head, his left forefinger, held upright in blessing, was encircled by a halo; his right hand, palm up, held an everchanging diversity of spherical objects: heads, stars, planets, apples, Saint-ships, eyeballs, universes, plasmals. His soothing voice spoke from a talk-bubble fluttering on leather wings above his shoulder. The lip-synch was poor.

‘The Interactive Holographic Advertising regulations require Primal Light Missions to inform you before any evangelism takes place that this simulacrum may be terminated at any time by saying the words “Away Avaunt”.’

Mathembe growled.

‘Very well. Hear, you downtrodden, you despairing, you poor, you sick, you lame and halt, you oppressed, you mourning, you defeated, you depressed: hear good news: LORD! SIYA! IS! HERE!’ Explosions of pastel ideograms accompanied the great pronouncement, fading like tiny novas as Mathembe walked away down Koinange Street. The hovering avatar accompanied her.

‘Hear now the marvellous truth of Lord Siyaya Siyananga!

‘Untold billennia ago, in the universe that preceded ours, that is called ya-Shu, dwelt a race known only as the High and Shining Ones; beings of such loveliness, such nobility that were we to behold one in even the ten-thousandth part of his glory we would worship him as God. Such were their powers that they might have outlived the universal death, but great was their wisdom, greater than any wisdom that calls itself wise. They chose rather to pass from life, die with their universe in the glorious fire of the retrobloc. Yet, that their knowledge and power might not pass utterly from being, they caused certain artefacts of power; rings, and beacons within which the light of ya-Shu was captured, to be contained within caskets of timelessness and thus escape the destruction. For they understood that even as they had conquered wickedness in their universe and attained perfection, yet evil would arise and needs be defeated by creatures of puissance and goodness. For untold billennia the rings and beacons of power fell through space. For ever, they might have fallen, but for the will of the High and Shining Ones who caused one such ring and beacon to come to earth upon a world so incredibly remote that if I were to begin to describe it it would overrun my programme parameters.’

Mathembe lashed out at the hovering image. But who can strike an angel? Even a holographic evangelist of Primal Light Missions?

‘A simple peasant, was he, our Lord, when as a boy he found the glorious artefacts, and having been judged by them time out of mind to be pure in heart, mouth, and deed, noble and upright in etiquette, was finally permitted to don the ring. Wonder! Glory! Transcendence! Power! For such was the purpose of the High and Shining Ones that whosoever was worthy of the ring might, by its power, draw upon the light of ya-Shu that was contained within the mystic beacons and whatsoever he willed, so it would be instantly created. More: to him would be given knowledge of all things, the power to traverse from world to world with but a single step, and the possession of power and wisdom incalculable. In one instant, one glorious instant, a humble man became as the High and Shining Ones themselves.

‘LORD! SIYAYA! SIYANANGA!

‘Homage to Lord Siya!

‘Praise to Lord Siya!

‘Glory to Lord Siya: All-Knowing, All-Powerful, swift to rescue, sure to redeem: Destroyer of Evil, Master of Earthly Passions, Conqueror of Sin and Failure, Guardian of Right, Defender of the Oppressed: if you but put your trust in him, he will come to you and by his power lead you on his path of purity and holiness.

‘LORD! SIYAYA! SIYANANGA!’

Hands seized the talk-bubble before it could flutter away. Leathery wings beat; Mathembe twisted the thing between her hands. Bones snapped, struts splintered. Organical ichor ran between her fingers onto the cobbles. The child-avatar’s lips moved, wordless as her own. Mathembe grinned, made an obscene gesture to Lord Siyaya Siyananga, All-Knowing, All-Powerful, Destroyer of Evil, Master of Earthly Passions, Guardian of Right.

Blue laser light struck dazzling to earth. A second hologram resolved itself before Mathembe; a towering Proclaimer patriarch, the Witness Rajee Rann, tall as a tenement, feet the size of municipal service organicals planted in the gutters of Koinange Avenue.

‘Know ye God!’ boomed the Witness Rajee Rann. Helicopters clattered overhead, distant and irrelevant as interstellar battle-cruisers. ‘Know ye God, that ye may be transfigured into His likeness and attain oneness with Him…’ A tremor shook the huge simulacrum like a lapse of faith. The guidance sensors had registered the activity of a dissenting hologram and brought a subroutine into play.

‘Blasphemer!’ roared the Witness Rajee Rann. A hooked sword appeared in his left hand, striking down from heaven at the Lord Siyaya Siyananga. Primal Light Missions responded with fuzzballs of light from its avatar’s right hand, where lay the power ring of the High and Shining Ones. In a flicker of clashing holograms, Mathembe Fileli slipped away. She had heard sirens dopplering along Ol Tok’s sweaty boulevards, gathering at some indeterminate point into a hard knot of sound. With a clapping of rotors that drowned momentarily the acrimonious feuding of the two gods, the helicopters came about in a sweeping arc above Koinange West. As they passed over Mathembe—low, hard, fast—she broke into a run. Something in the street had called her name. The winking navigation lights guided her.

The end of the boulevard was solid vehicles and flashing lights. The helicopters that had guided Mathembe to this place hovered at rooftop height, searchlights stabbing down into the street. People had gathered. People will always gather where there are sirens and flashing lights. Unseen, untouchable as a spirit, Mathembe passed through them. The great black battletrux lay on its side against the parapet of a small municipal fountain. Ichor bled from ten, twenty, fifty bullet holes. The cobbles shone slick with it under the focused beams of helicopter-light. The bodies lay on the wet boulevard. Some were attended by medicals. Some were unattended. Some were covered with sheets.

Mathembe walked on, a ghost.

Two silhouettes knelt by a dark mound. Whispers exchanged. A valise opened. The monomolecule plastic of a loop was a line of light. One of the kneeling figures grunted with brief exertion. A click, audible even over the thunder of helicopter engines. The second kneeling figure lifted the head by the hair. Two new figures pushed the headless meat into a plastic bag.

Mathembe walked on.

She found him sitting against the side of an ambulance wrapped in a thermoplastic blanket. She touched two fingers to his arm, made a small bird whistle. He looked. He recognised. He smiled. She struck him across the face. Hard. Very hard. As hard as she could strike, with all the anger and worry and fear and concern and guilt in her spirit. And in the same second, she pulled him to her, embraced him, pushed his face into her shoulder cry now, cry, rocked him rocked him. Rocked him.

A policeperson stood against the light from the sky. His lips moved. Mathembe frowned.

‘Bloody useless racket,’ he shouted. ‘Is this one yours?’

A nod.

‘Is he hurt?’

A shake. A shrug.

‘I suppose you might as well get him out of here back home. It has been a bloody mess. A bloody mess.’

A questioning frown.

‘Stupid bloody idiots, tearing up the boulevards. Stupid bloody kids. What makes them want to go out tearing the place to pieces playing like kings of the street? Why the hell did they not stop when they saw the checkpoint? What else could they do but shoot when they saw it was not going to stop, bloody black bastard of a thing. Like something from the bottom of the south sea, that bloody thing. Bloody mess. What a bloody mess. God knows how many dead; three? Four? Five? The older ones, that is who I blame. Put the kids up to it. Bare-ass naked as the day they first spoke, some of them. Can you understand that? Beyond me. A bloody mess, that is all I know it is. Bloody mess.

‘Go on. Out of here. Out of my sight. I will pretend I never saw you.’

She locked herself with Hradu in the uppermost bedroom. Mother banged on the door. Faradje banged on the door. Friends, neighbours banged on the door. A Dose of Worms was summoned to bang on the door. Grandfather’s head shouted outside the door. Mathembe ignored them all.

First, the shock and shivering.

Second, the pleading. Let me out, let me out Mathembe, please.

Third, the impatience. If you do not let me out so help me God I will…

Fourth, the play-acting: I am sick, can you not see, I need help.

Fifth, the stubbornness: If you are not going to say anything, then I am not going to say anything, and then we shall see who can go the longer without saying anything.

Sixth: the sullen silence.

Through them all, the shivering and the pleading and the impatience and the play-acting and the stubbornness and the silence, Mathembe sat, Mathembe stared, Mathembe waited.

And after the silence, words.

‘I am not going to excuse myself, I am not going to explain myself, I am not going to say I am sorry, not to you, because it has nothing to do with you you bitch sitting there, always sitting there never speaking never saying a word just watching, just what is wrong in your head, just what went wrong with you in the womb, eh? just what do you think gives you the right to say what Hradu does and what Hradu does not do, who told you you were to be my conscience, my guide, my mother? You are not my mother, understand? This is not your life, this is my life, my own: who said you could choose it for me? You do not know anything about me, not one thing. You have this idea about who I am and what I am like and how I should be and do you know what? You do not know a thing. Not a thing. You are always too busy, when are you ever here? out down in the Flesh Market all the time, or seeing that Proclaimer boyfriend of yours—oh, I know all about him, the Boys know all about him, lucky for you he is one of us—Ma is still getting over that thing with that lawyer, Faradje is a bum, a tit-grabbing bum, and Grandfather, he thinks he knows it all but all he does is sit around getting pissed on your money pretending he is the great Nationalist, the hero, the one who died rather than speak a word of New Speech even if he speaks it as good as the Emperor in his Jade City. At least I am doing something, not just words words words; everyone has words, all those words, and what do they do? Nothing at all, that is what they do.

‘All those words about what we are going to do about Pa, all those words we wasted on the bastard Sharjah. Every one of those words was paid for in blood, in Ma’s blood, and what did they do? No, I have had enough words, words about Ma, words about Pa. I do not know if he is alive or if he is dead, where he is, when he will come back to us; I have stopped thinking about that because it is all just words words words and none of them will bring him any closer to tell us if he is still alive.

‘Do you not understand? If I go out with the Boys, if I stone troops, if I throw firebombs, if I beat the shit out of Proclaimers, if I run roadblocks, if I get shot at, I am doing it for him. I am paying them back, for all the things we do not know about him, for every drop of Ma’s blood, I am paying them back, I am putting right the wrong things in my own way. So, it is not your way, it is not how you would want to do it, but it is the only way I know and you know? it makes me feel good. It is my war now, my own battle. You do not have the right, no one has the right, to take it from me. I have thought about it, I have decided, it is mine. It is between me and him and no one else.’

A hundred things she should have said came welling up like blood from a wound in Mathembe’s mind, each glib, each trite, each sanctimonious and hypocritical, so that for once she was glad of her gift of silence for she was shamed by her brother. And now that it was quiet and safe, came the knocking at the door, and her Mother’s voice saying, ‘I think you should both come out here. There is something on the radio I think you should hear.’

Hunger strike. Day eighty-eight. Nineteen twenty-seven in the evening. A news flash beamed into every ear-cockle, splattered across every videowall and hologram, every municipal tram-halt television. We are interrupting this broadcast to report the death earlier this evening of Ol Tok councillor Adé Janderambelé on the eighty-eighth day of his hunger strike.

And the streets and the avenues and the big bright boulevards that had been full of people hurrying on their way to cafés or restaurants with flowers and bottles of wine and boxes of imported sweet eats fall silent and immobile in shock.

They could not let it happen, how could they have let it happen, they could not let someone starve himself to death in any kind of decent civilised country. But they have. He did. Up on their hills, by their biolit poolsides, on the terraces of their country clubs, at their dinner parties and supper clubs, the Proclaimers crowed.

For a night and a day the Confessors in their ghettos and endlessly unrolling suburbs, in their hives and tenements, in their Flesh Markets and Drug Markets, on their boulevards and avenues, in their doorways and tunnels kept silence. Shock. Anger. Twin spirits, joined at hip and heart, with empty, giggling brain pans.

The soldiers of the Emperor Across the River intensified their presence. Those were the words the Voice of the Empire beaming from the heart of the Jade City used for troop transports on every street corner; for roadblocks on every routeway between Confessor and Proclaimer boros; for helicopters beating beating beating the sky to blood above Ol Tok, enough helicopters to lift the whole city bodily into heaven and the nearer presence of the saints; for young men spreadeagled against walls while policepersons checked their smartcards, for soldiers with sin-black datavisors smashing into homes to evaporate your daughter your son your husband your wife your lover: intensified presence.

A night and a day of silence. And then, as if a great word had been spoken, the Confessors rose up. Anger emptied itself into violence, an unfocused expression of communal fury: Proclaimer shops looted, Proclaimer houses burned, Imperial offices stormed and torched, municipal transport smashed and set alight, trux and jeepneys maimed and slaughtered, streets barricaded with rotting flesh.

The intensified presence of the Emperor Across the River awoke from its dark entries and dim street corners and roared in the heat of the night. Troop carriers slewed to a halt across Ol Tok’s luminous boulevards where a day and a night before people had gone with their flowers and wine and expensive sweet eats. Soldiers in bioweapon-proof riot armour armed with shock-staves filed into cordons and containments. A spark was struck. A keynote sounded. The streets exploded. The directionless, unfocused rage had target and purpose now.

The people hurled themselves upon the soldiers; men and women, old and young. Understand: rage is not a thing bound by age and sex, rage is strong, rage is hot, rage is ever young. And foolish. Armed with whatever their hands found—glass cobbles, chunks of paving brick, pieces of ripped-away biotecture, smashed café furniture, blistered ceramics, fused plastic slag—they broke upon the black soldiers of the Emperor. Hands tore. Hands smashed. Hands hacked and gouged. Hands beat beat beat themselves bloody.

And the soldiers drove them back.

Again the people broke upon the adamant black edge of the Empire.

And the soldiers drove them back.

A third time the people hurled themselves upon the soldiers, like the waves of the Elder Sea where the dark things drown. They pressed and they pressed but the soldiers held them, the soldiers held them, the soldiers held them, like the land holds against the sea.

From their attics, from their fire-escapes, from rooftops and tenement windows, the Warriors of Destiny saw the moment and opened fire.

Where are the Warriors? the people had asked. Our Warriors, where are our boys? Every soldier that fell, a neat bullet hole punched cleanly through plastic riot shield and plastic bioweapon-proof body armour was their answer. Fifty thousand voices thundered approval. Fifty thousand fists punched air. They were committed now. No more wavering, no more indecision. The lines were drawn, war declared. Smiling, the Warriors of Destiny reloaded for their second volley. The soldiers began to be afraid. Their resolve wavered. Their advance failed. Leaving their fallen black on the shining boulevards, they withdrew to the cover of their troop transports. Charges ricocheted from their armoured machines: Ghost-Boy-grown battle viruses and poisons found no purchase on Imperial foundry plate. The young men, the loud, bragging young men who are always at the head of any trouble, danced and jeered and lobbed firebombs that fell in a gout of liquid flame among the dead. The mob shouted glee at every transport that backed away out of the flames.

—Come on come on come on all you fine soldiers, taunted the young men. —All you fine brave soldiers hiding behind your machines, come out come out come out.

Then a new sound was heard in the boulevards. Drums. Drums drums drums. Crashing louder, louder even than the sound of the fluttering, useless helicopters, shaking the city by its throat, step in time with us, with us. The people hesitated drew back. For they had seen the banners, and the proud marching men, and the glint of neon from the beating drums. The Proclaimers. Come down from their hills and suburbs and country clubs and supper parties, ordered up beneath the banners of the Spirit Lodges, marching to the beat of their man-skin drums to the aid of their Empire when their Emperor had most need of them. Loyal and true. The banners hung limply in the thick heat of the night. Drums beating beating beating, the Proclaimers formed up behind the beaten soldiers of the Emperor. When you know there is someone at your back, that you are not naked and alone in a thousand kilometres of alien and hostile land, that puts fibre in your muscles, stiffness in your back, fire in your heart and hands. You are a soldier of the Emperor, that is what you are. You are not a mudman, you do not need mudmen to tell you that.

The fine, brave soldiers came. Out from behind their transports they came firing. Firing and firing and firing their weapons. And the mob screamed and the mob broke and the mob ran and the mob that was no mob now but only people, an atomic sea of fleeing individuals, tried to hide themselves but the soldiers kept coming, firing and firing and firing. They had been made to look shameful and no soldier will tolerate being humiliated by mudmen.

The mudmen went down before them.

Behind the advancing lines of troop carriers came the Proclaimers, drumskins bloody from beating hands, banners leaning in red pursuit. In their attics and rooftops, the Warriors of Destiny let off a rattle of fire; soldiers went down, banners waved and keeled. Laser sights weaved across the skyline of Ol Tok, then the heavy turret-mounted weapons gave answer and the Warriors of Destiny had no reply. The people fled before the soldiers, but they were soldiers, men who are given orders and obey orders: their black-uniformed officers called a halt to their advance and they stopped to take prisoners capture weapons aid the wounded and the maimed. But the Proclaimers poured on, running now, scooping up discarded clubs, spears, blades. They had the scent of it now. One thousand years of passion is not restrained by the command halt.

They stayed by the radio deep into the morning in the apartment on Lantern Lane, never straying more than necessity demanded from the receiver with its always reasonable, always right Voice of the Empire. They feared they might not be included in a solidifying moment of history.

Widespread civil disturbances are still being reported in districts of Ol Tok. Large-scale looting and destruction of property is continuing though crowds of demonstrators are being dispersed by police and army. Disturbances have also been reported in Oldonok and Kuwera and many rural prefecture roads have been blocked by armed vigilantes. Police barracks and army outposts have been attacked.

‘It is the Rising, the Rising!’ shouted the head. ‘At last, at last, the people have risen!’

‘Shut up you old fool,’ said Mathembe’s Mother.

In the cities and towns, Proclaimer communities have been arming themselves and sealing off entire districts in expectation of attack by Confessor mobs, though as yet there have been reports of only minor sectarian skirmishes. Communications with outlying regions have been badly disrupted. In Ol Tok, security forces have come under fire from units of the Warriors of Destiny and have returned fire. A number of arrests have been made. Army and police casualties are described as minimal…The apartment trembled as a helicopter thundered over at rooftop height. An assault on Civil Service headquarters has been repelled.

‘More’s the pity,’ said Faradje. The sound of many vehicles, many engines, many track links passing down Keekorok Boulevard reverberated in Lantern Lane’s crevices and acoustic crannies. Faradje lifted the tiny organical to his ear. Frowned. Stared in naked disbelief at the device in his hands. Went out onto the balcony, raised the little radio above his head. Threw it down with all his strength. The radio burst on the cobbles in a mess of sap and circuitry.

‘I will not have lies in my house,’ he said. ‘I will not have lies. This is not a house of lies. They said Bujumbura Ballpark was burning. They said we had done it. We had set light to them, to our own.’

With the radio dead the people in the apartment now had only the sound of the street from which to piece together the thing that was happening to their city. Snap and crack of gunfire. Clatter of forged steel tracks. Heavy stammer of automatic weapon fire, frighteningly close and sudden. Shouting voices, voices as devoid of words as Mathembe’s. Far removed: rataplan of drums drums drums. Engines, radios, the flat, remote blare of overamplified voices. Close, intimate: a soul swearing elegiacally, almost in religious ecstasy. Universal, omnipresent; the beating wings of the Emperor’s war helicopters.

And then a new sound. A startling sound. The sound of the harsh, incongruous syllables of the men from across the river.

It was a stupid thing to do, to rush to the balcony to see what the voices of the Emperor were doing down in Lantern Lane. But what is one more stupidity in the vaster and nobler stupidity that was engulfing the city? They saw that every other balcony was filled with stupid, curious people just like them.

There were soldiers down there. Somehow, God only knew how, they had come blundering in on unarmoured traix. Reconnoitring. Cut off from their units. Messengers. Lost. Sightseeing. War sacramentalises our stupidities. But they must have realised they were far from home, for they looked up and saw the eyes watching them from Lantern Lane’s many many balconies. And if that were not certainty enough, the hands convinced them. One hand first, slapping balcony railing. Slap sla-sla-slap. The rhythm passed from balcony to balcony, hand to hand. Slap sla-sla-slap. The hands beat, the eyes looked down into the sounding drum that was Lantern Lane. The doors opened. The men stood in the open doorways. The men knew and the soldiers knew and every hand beating every railing slap sla-sla-slap knew.

They were the mob’s now.

The soldiers tried to kick their traix into motion but the slap sla-sla-slap had spooked the organicals. They revved. They whined. They ran in mindless circles. The soldiers swore horribly but could not control their mounts.

The men stepped out of their open doorways. The soldiers were encircled. One of the soldiers was screaming into his helmet microphone but the slap sla-sla-slap slap sla-sla-slap screamed louder. Louder. Faster. Faster. Louder louder. Faster faster. Louderlouder fasterfaster.

And stopped.

The first stone was thrown. A soldier fell from his traix, clutching his face. The stone had shattered his data visor, driven spears of plastic into his eyes. Blood squeezed from between his fingers. The blood excited the mob. The holy silence broke in a purr of delight. The men rushed in upon the soldiers.

Mathembe shrieked, reached forward as Hradu swung himself over the balcony, went hand over hand down the ducting and pipework to join the mob. She was half over the railing to drag him back from the brink of irrevocable action. Faradje’s hand on her collar stayed her.

‘Leave him. Leave him. They will tear apart anyone who tries to stop them. They do not care who. There is nothing you can do. Come inside. We do not want to see this.’

Mathembe snatched free from Faradje’s gentle grip. She would stay. She would see.

Lantern Lane was a sea of heads and hands and fists raised against heaven, highlighted by the smile of the Five Hearts Beer Girl.

What do you think of this, Lady of the Boulevards? Sacrifice enough for you?

A shot split the night.

The mob quivered.

A second shot. The mob fell back, growling, surly. Only one soldier remained standing. He waved his weapon in the face of the mob. He was shouting, New Speech, his mother tongue. All that could be understood was the fear in his voice and that required no translator. His helmet had been lost. His hair shone golden blond in the hologram light. So young. Screaming still in his incomprehensible New Speech, he dragged his friend across the greasy cobbles to the door of a dead and derelict tenement house. Fear gave him a strength the mob respected.

The synthetic flesh of the two traix had been stamped into the cobbles. Ceramoplastic bones had been torn out for use as weapons.

The screaming blond soldier blew in the door with a pulse of his weapon. He dragged his friend inside. From her place above the crowd Mathembe could not tell if his comrade was alive or dead. The surface tension was pierced. The mob rushed into the empty space. Some charged the doorway and were driven back by fire from the soldier’s weapon. Some dragged shattered limbs, some sat clutching their faces, some lay hands raised in the air, some lay unmoving in strange, unnatural postures.

Stones bones bottles cobbles rained against the dead house. The mob fell upon the house, beat it with their fists. We. Are. Coming. To. Kill. You. We. Are. Coming. To. Kill. You. We. Are. Coming. To. Kill. You.

Then someone struck fire.

The people sighed a huge, wondering sigh, drew back from the holy fire. The fire was passed from hand to hand, split into many fires. The young men, the fire bearers, lifted their flames high for the people to see and threw them down at the base of the house. The flames flickered doubtfully. Some guttered low. Some guttered out. A wind from across the river blew into Lantern Lane. The wind gave heart to the flames, carried them up the bulging sides of the dead house. Ancient, tinder-dry ligno-plastic blistered, popped, exploded into flame. Fire raced up the face of the tenement house. Again, the mob sighed its huge, wondering sigh. Mathembe caught sight of Hradu’s face, there, in the front row, upturned with the others, lit red by the flames.

The long, licking flames sent final flickers of sentience through the long-cold neural pathways of the house. Fire. Pain. Burning. It woke. It screamed, every window and entry opened wide. Out of the mouth of that terminal scream came the soldier. Leaping out in a graceful dive. Arms outstretched, like the falling saints of the Ykondé pantheon. He fell towards the waiting mob.

He seemed to take a very long time to fall.

The mob raised its fists and stones and bones and Mathembe could not look any more.

We are strong.

We are strong.

We are the people. The people.

We shall stand by ourselves. Alone.

The house was one great flame now. Sparks poured up into the night. By the fire’s red light the people passed from hand to hand to hand the things they had scavenged from the soldier. Scraps of cloth. Boots. Bootlaces. Wallet. Photographs of lovers. Shards of shattered helmet. The heart-in-hand badge of the aged aged Emperor. The black weapon. Glowing red flakes settled on the men’s hair and hands and clothing as they paraded the looted things above their heads like icons in a festival. They did not notice. Glowing red flakes of ash settled on the roofs and balconies of their homes. They did not notice. The burning house collapsed in coals and molten plastics.

It was over. It was broken.

The men saw what they held in their hands and were ashamed. They tried to put them down, put them away but their hands would not let them. The bones, the scraps, the wallets, the photographs clung to their hands. As the strong wind from across the river swirled and eddied, they looked at their hands. They did not see, no one saw, the flames running under the windows along the edge of the roofs, the flames leaping from rooftop to rooftop to rooftop, leaping like Nyakabindi demon dancers across the narrow canyon of Lantern Lane.

Then one man felt a falling flake of ash stroke his face and burn him. He looked up. The wind blew, hard, and the entire street was on fire.

‘My God my God my God!’ he shouted. ‘There are people in those houses!’

A blue lightning flash, a huge blast. Lantern Lane shook. Mathembe rocked on her unsteady perch. Ribbons of plastic membrane rained down into the street. The tethered glo-globes had detonated. A dying globe collapsed in flames onto the roof of Faradje’s tenement house. Mathembe leapt back into the apartment as a curtain of fire fell on the balcony.

‘Down, down,’ Mathembe’s Mother shouted and she was again the brilliant, competent woman Mathembe had always known. The fire had re-ignited her spirit. ‘Down. Downstairs.’

Faradje stood like a fool in paradise in the living room, arms spread wide wanting to take every scrap of his comfortable life with him, unable to make the cruellest of choices, to play the five-minute game. His sister seized his fat arm, propelled him down the stairs. Smoke filled the evil-smelling room; Mrs Fileli snatched up the head. Without a backward look she was down the stairs and pushing Faradje through the gently falling drops of blazing plastic. Mathembe, in the street, among the wheeling, bellowing people and the soft snow of ash, took the head. The Five Hearts Beer Girl was haloed in flames. Cool cool moisture dewed the sacramental bottle. I have done my best, sole and faithful worshipper. Now is Götterdämmerung. With a final wink and a smile, the tanks of laser coolant exploded spectacularly. Shards of hologram fell sparkling into Lantern Lane as wild lasers raked the street, uncontrolled, sinful. Where laser struck god-shard, an image of the Five Hearts Beer Girl was impressed indelibly into the glass cobbles.

Hradu? Mathembe asked with her body. Her Mother shrugged, a terrible, careless, abandoning shrug. Mother, daughter, uncle, head fled with the tail-end of refugees between monumental pillars of fire onto Keekorok Boulevard. In a gout of flame and sparks Faradje’s tenement block folded in onto itself.

An entire boro was burning. The evacuees backed across Keekorok Boulevard. Though the heat was infernal, they were tied there by the fascination of fire. Sirens became audible over the roar and suck of destruction. Personnel carriers came pounding down Keekorok Boulevard, slammed to halt at threatening angles. Troops poured out—black troops, with flames reflected in their night-visors. They formed a cordon line down the smoke-filled boulevard. The wide street was littered with the detritus of riot.

The people were afraid. Much afraid. The fire had only been destruction, the soldiers of the Emperor were fear itself. Not even God could tell what they might do in their anger. The soldiers moved into position between the people and the fire. An officer struggled to make himself heard over the burning.

‘You cannot stay here,’ he shouted. ‘It is not safe. Move on back down the boulevard.’

‘Those are our houses!’ someone answered him.

‘Were our houses,’ someone close by muttered.

‘It is not safe to remain here,’ the officer said again. ‘We have orders to evacuate all the way out to Red Hill. Please. Go now, before it is too late and we are all cut off.’

A burning building on the end of Lantern Lane toppled into Keekorok Boulevard. Without waiting for the soldiers, the people drew back towards Ogundelé Plaza and River Way.

‘Pray the wind does not change,’ said a man next to Mathembe who had lived with his sick wife in the apartment next to Faradje. Mathembe watched the flames leaping greedily to catch the stars and burn them. Helicopters passed overhead; always, always, helicopters. There was an explosion, hard, flat. And another. And another. Close by. Four. Five. Six. A woman started to scream and would not stop.

‘They are blowing the houses!’ cried a young woman. ‘They are blasting a firebreak with air-to-surface missiles!’

‘No, it is biogas plants going up,’ said a fat woman, shiny with smoke and sweat. A seventh blast shattered Keekorok Boulevard. A spinning object arced high through the air, trailing flames, fell to earth somewhere close to Kiyoyo Avenue.

‘They have evacuated as far as Kijembe,’ said a girl who had saved only the cockle radio in her ear.

Then Mathembe felt a breeze stroke her face, her hand, ruffle her hair.

‘Oh dear God dear God dear God!’ a woman shouted for all of them. Down towards Ladywell the flames were bending low across Keekorok Boulevard to touch the banks and cafés and insurance houses and set them burning.

‘Stay exactly where you are!’ shouted the officer but Mathembe could hear the uncertainty in his voice, the hesitation that is fatal to authority. ‘The situation is under control. There is no cause for panic. The situation is under control. We will withdraw in an orderly and systematic fashion towards Ogundelé Plaza.’

Perhaps if he had not said ‘The situation is under control’ the people would not have panicked. But it is to those words that the fear in the voice most attaches itself and the fear ran faster than even the flames running along the rooftops of Keekorok Boulevard. Each smelt the fire, imagined their flesh crackling and searing and charring and burning, their souls going up in white heat. The people broke and ran. Civilians, soldiers, Confessors, Proclaimers. The confused, brave officer was trampled down. Community no more. Discipline no more. Morality no more. The sole good is one’s self.

But the fire outran them. The First Keekorok Savings Factor and Credit Union crashed into the street. Penned in by flame on three sides, the people tore their way through the tangle of narrow streets to the west of Keekorok. Bodies surged through the closes and entries, filled them up with their rising tide as behind them the red glow in the sky grew wider, taller. Mathembe, her Mother, her uncle, the head were carried along, in the flood of fear. Mathembe saw her Mother’s face, her Mother’s arm outstretched, saw the bodies press between, saw her Mother carried away from her, swept away into a different stream, down a different street, along different closes and courses.

Alone.

On. On. Do not look up to see if the flames are outracing you from rooftop to rooftop. Do not look up to see the glow in the sky spread until half the night is on fire. Do not look up when you hear the shatter of blades overhead so low that you would cry out in fear had you breath, had you life, had you energy to do anything but run. Do not look up. Look down. Your enemies are not the flames. Your enemies are your fellow humans. Look down. Watch your feet for if you trip, if you fall, they will crush you without a thought. Look down, look carefully, watch their feet: a gun, a smashed drum, a broken mask, a toppled newspillar, a cracked crystal column leaking organical ichor—no head to be seen—a tattered shop awning, cartridge cases, a torn shirt: a body, oh God a body you cannot avoid it, you hurdle over it you cannot avoid looking at the face, you know it you know it, it is it is…

No. You only thought you knew it.

It had not been him.

It had not been Ghavra, the Proclaimer political jangada poet.

On. On.

But you had wished, for an instant, that it had been him. It would have been worthy punishment for a faithless Proclaimer political jangada poet. And then you are sorry. Ghavra, wherever you are, whatever you are fighting with, be alive.

Then: still. No movement in the packed mass of bodies. Voices: New Speech. A smell: within, above, beyond the smell of smoke and fire: a deep, womb-water smell: the river. A sound: within, beyond, above the sirens and the thunder of burning: the threshing of riverboats. A vision: lights moving in the offing; massive rafts of barges and lighters, like entire floating cities, manoeuvring out there in the flame-lit water, shapes moving: riverboats? Shuttleboats? Ferries?

Hair matting under your feet, not cobbles.

Water, not buildings all close around you.

Fear to your left: Where are we going, where are we going?

Fear to your right: They are taking us off on ferries, out to the riverboats.

Fear in front of you: The radio says the Warriors are still fighting; there are uprisings now in every Prefecture in the land.

Fear behind you: Where can we go now? Where will they take us if the whole land is rising up against the Emperor? Across the river? Are we to be hostages for our land?

‘Let us off, let us off!’ the head cradled in Mathembe’s arms shouted. ‘We cannot go onto a riverboat, we have people back there.’ But it was just another voice among the ten thousand pushing down the riversteps towards the flame-red waters. The fat, awkward ferries moved across the waters in towards the shore, ran their boarding ramps up against the holy steps where the pilgrims washed their sins away. Beyond those nearer craft, out in the deep-water channel, the ferries were offloading earlier cargoes of refugees onto the barges and floats and lighters, all lit red, green, gold with riding lights. The evacuees swept towards the boarding ramps, up onto the boats, faces lit red, gold, green by the great burning behind them. Even as the ferry captains pulled up their ramps, pulled away from the sacred steps, engine muscles groaning at the burden of lives, a few souls clung to ropes, plastic trux-tyre buffers, waded chest-deep into the flame-red water towards reaching hands.

Mathembe struggled to escape the inexorable press of bodies onto the boats, pushed back toward the Corniche. A soldier stopped her on the riversteps.

‘Sorry,’ he said. His Old Speech was atrocious.

‘Her mother my daughter her brother my grandson her uncle,’ the head jabbered, crazy and incoherent with the spirit of panic.

‘Sorry,’ said the soldier. ‘None go back there. God knows how many dead; fire, fighting. God know. Must to go on ferryboat.’

The red, green, gold light in Mathembe’s eyes read desperation.

‘Make to river, all of you,’ said the soldier. ‘Be all right. Find again when all is over. Go. Now.’ The soldier gently pushed Mathembe into a column of people moving up and onto a ferry. The soldier was a year at most older than she was. His long hair, clasped with the hand of the Emperor, was the colour of the sun.

A man with a geneshape bird-toy in a cage helped Mathembe to the side of the boat. Mathembe balanced the head carefully on the rail. He balanced his bird in its cage beside her head. One by one the boats retracted their ramps. Paddle-wheels trod water, the boats moved into the deep water where the big commercial ships waited.

The ferryboat turned, swept Mathembe with her grandfather across an awesome panorama. The city was one great flame now, lit sporadically by detonations and rocked by bursts of weapons-fire. Bourse and Corniche were all heads, hands, faces. Then the current caught the ferry, turned it into the deep flow. The paddlewheel thrashed and Mathembe was carried away, out into the black night and the dark water and the waiting nation of barges and lighters and dispossession. Helicopters, jewelled clusters of navigation lights in the black velvet night, roared low overhead, headed east towards the burning city.