22
The next afternoon after work, Vai brought a fruit he called mamey. The smooth pink flesh had a rich flavor, spiked with the lime juice he squeezed over slices scooped out of the rind.
“Perhaps you would like to attend a batey match,” he said.
“Perhaps I would. Mmm. The texture is like cream.” I licked my lips. “But I have to work.”
The intensity of his serious gaze disturbed me more than did the sweetness of his charming smile. “You work hard, Catherine. You’ve sewn singlets for the little lads, and blouses for the little lasses. If I ask, Aunty will say no harm to miss one afternoon’s work.”
“If you ask?” I examined him. “Does this have anything to do with last night?”
The flare of his eyes told me something, only I did not know what. He obviously did not intend to discuss the incident with me. “Let me know.”
“I’ll go with Luce and her friends,” I said with a defiant lift of my chin.
He agreed so quickly I wondered if this had been his plan all along. “Yes. They’re tall gals, too. You won’t stand out so much.”
“Do I stand out?”
He rose and took a step away, and just as I thought he was going to leave without answering, he paused and looked back as if he knew what I was waiting for. “Always, Catherine. Always.”
With that parting shot, more like a taunting volley of stinging crossbow bolts in advance of a battle, he deserted me for the company of his friends who just then surged in through the gate. After an excited conversation they hurried out. For the next three days I barely saw him. Our regular customers talked of nothing except a huge outdoor meeting planned in support of the call for an Assembly. They began a betting pool on how quickly violence would break out and how many would be shot or arrested by the wardens.
“Can I go?” Luce asked plaintively, to which her mother and grandmother united in a staggeringly firm “No,” after which they confiscated the money collected by the betting pool and distributed the coins to the beggars and mothers of twins in the local market.
“Yee shall not go either, Cat,” Aunty said to me later, “for there shall be wardens out in plenty. Yee must do nothing to come to they attention.”
“I won’t go,” I promised her.
The morning of the day planned for the demonstration dawned red. The winds died, and the air’s flavor deadened and then came alive with an odd anticipatory snap. People hurried home early from work, and at the boardinghouse we shuttered all the windows and braced doors and furniture and storage barrels as well as tightly roping down the roof cistern.
I overheard Uncle Joe say to Vai, “They shall have to cancel the demonstration.”
At dusk a storm blew through with gusting winds and pelting rain. Flying above it, a shuddering voice sang in a language I did not know, with words like drumrolls and trumpet shrieks whose cadence made me twist and turn all night until dawn came and the winds calmed and the rain ceased. The storm had torn down a few trees and damaged a few roofs.
“Was that a hurricane?” I asked Luce as her little sisters swept away leaves and broken branches while we took down the shutters and unstacked tables and benches.
She grinned cheekily. “Yee’s such a maku. That was nothing. I’s so angry. I was all set to sneak out to the demonstration. Yee shall not tell, will yee?”
“Will you promise me you’ll never go to such a demonstration without permission and someone to keep an eye on you?”
She frowned. “Yee’s no help! Anyway, Vai say yee want to go to a batey match. There is a women’s game here in Passaporte come Venerday. Yee shall go with me and me friends.”
“I’d like that. Luce, how did Vai and Kayleigh get here?”
Two of the little lads had begun bashing each other with broken branches. She chased them down, took the branches away, and returned to me. “Yee can ask him that question.”
“I can, but I’m asking you instead of telling Aunty that you meant to sneak out.”
She rolled her eyes in that way she had. “Yee just don’ want to ask him. I don’ know what yee and he fought over-”
“Which is none of your business.”
“Ooo! That is a sour face! Can yee make goat’s milk curdle with it?”
I laughed, spotted the little lads digging for branches in the sweepings, and gave them the eye. They ran off giggling, without branches.
“They came in on the fourth day of Martius.”
“You remember exactly?”
“Me father is a sailor. Of course I know all the shipping schedules.” She levered up a bench and I caught the end to help her carry it. “They two came here to the boardinghouse on the fifth of Martius. They came in on a vessel out of Porto Dumnos ’twas hauling barrels of salted fish. No chance of missing that, for they clothes stank of herring.”
No wonder Vai had been unable to follow me into the spirit world. By Imbolc, at the beginning of Februarius, he had already been at sea, undoubtedly at the mansa’s command.
“Do you know the exact date General Camjiata arrived?” When she gave me a curious look, I hurried on. “He is quite the villain in Europa. No wonder the Council isn’t happy he came.”
“That man shall bring all kind of trouble,” she agreed. “He made landfall on the nineteenth day of Februarius on a schooner registered to a local shipping house.”
Which meant his breakout had been planned long in advance.
“He came looking for yee, Cat,” said Luce with a frown.
“The general?” I asked with real alarm. I did not need that complication on top of all else!
She rolled her eyes again. “Yee’s an escaped Amazon from he army?”
“Can’t I have made a joke?” I said with a false smile as I realized what she had meant.
“No joke to he who traveled so far to seek yee.”
“Is that what Vai told you?” It was a foolish question, answered by the very fact of my asking it. Vai had told everyone he had come to the Antilles to look for the perdita, his lost woman.
Which meant Kayleigh and I were the only ones who knew it for a lie.
Why had he really come to Expedition? More importantly, why had the mansa allowed it? Commanded it?
What did the mansa want that was also in the Antilles?
There was only one thing I could think of: Camjiata.
Vai had brought with him a sword forged of cold steel. Cold steel in the hand of a cold mage severs the soul from the body with a cut: They need only draw blood to kill you.
The mansa had sent Vai out to do his dirty work before. Vai had destroyed a magnificent airship and then gloated over his triumph. “ They were sure I was too inexperienced to manage it!?”
Yet he was not a heartless killer. He had refused to kill me. Surely I was the one bred and raised to be a heartless killer, not him.
“Cat, can yee help me with this table?”
My thoughts slammed back to earth. “Where do you want it?”
Because Venerday was Kayleigh’s usual half day off each week, she accompanied us to the batey match. Vendors had set up on the open ground outside Passaporte’s ball court, selling baked yams, roasted corn, and cassava bread, things that could be eaten with the fingers. A few sold kerchiefs in the colors and patterns by which a person advertised allegiance to one of Expedition’s teams. Some kerchiefs bore unusual sigils that marked teams from within the Taino kingdom.
“Do Taino teams play here as well?” I asked.
“Assuredly. And if there is a celebration in the Taino kingdom, like a noble marriage or birth, there shall be games at the border plaza.”
Not for us the vendors’ expensive food; we’d eaten before we left the boardinghouse. In a jostling delight of girls of whom Luce at almost sixteen was the youngest and I at twenty was one of the eldest, we paid our entry fee for the cheap seats and climbed to the top row. I enjoyed the feeling of being half hidden among them, because the young women of Expedition were, on the whole, tall and big and healthy, quite unlike the frailer, sallower, shorter women of cold Adurnam. I was so accustomed to men and women seated separately in public venues that intermingling forcibly recalled to me how foreign a place Expedition was. Yet my companions felt no compunction about pushing their way through the ranks of young men, seeking a spot where we could all sit together. They were the boldest girls I had ever met, and I loved them for it, and for the way they took me in as if I were Luce’s cousin and treated me as if I were no different from one of their own.