Guixpax left, glowing with achievement but confused by the situation that his mistress appeared to be so enjoying. Cyrena waited for him to depart, then selected a choice of garments and placed them outside the bathroom door.
‘Ishmael, there are clean clothes outside the door.’
‘Thank you, er…?’
She realised, with some embarrassment, that she had not yet told him her name. ‘Cyrena,’ she replied. ‘My name is Cyrena.’
‘Cyrena,’ he repeated, the room of steam and perfume echoing the name.
Tsungali’s ghost had followed its master as far as the garden; he had neither the will nor the desire to enter the elaborate and confusing dwelling.
He watched from the dense colour of the unusual foliage. It was a pleasant place, and he passed through the plants and trees with idleness. His master was safe and at peace inside the house, with a woman and servant to look after him; the villain who had threatened Ishmael’s life was nowhere near, so Tsungali let himself be diluted by time, so that no one saw him crouching down among the energetic growth and high, containing walls.
Ishmael padded softly down the hallway and found her in her favourite room, drinking golden wine from a long-stemmed glass. She did not hear him arrive, so light was his footfall. He was wearing Chinese silk slippers that she had left for him. Very quietly, he said, ‘Thank you, Cyrena.’
She stood up and looked at him, allowing herself to linger on the details of his presence, basking in his proximity. He was wearing silk pyjamas and the blue dressing gown that she had left him. His hair was still wet. She looked at his face, at how the scars around his eye seemed to gather his features together at that point, giving it a bunched squint. His nose was a little worse for wear; the straight line of it veered a little between loose folds and taut stretchings. Apart from this, it was the normal face of a slender young man who looked as though he had lived a troubled and weather-beaten life. He began to raise his hand again, his insecurity blooming under her gaze, but she crossed the room to stop him, reaching out to his hand and holding it in her own. She led him to the window seat and they sat looking at each other for an endless, unruffled time, the evening darkening around them.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ she said eventually. Handing him her glass, she moved away to fill another, then turned back to him. ‘It’s been a long time since the carnival, and many things have changed for us both, I am sure, but… perhaps we should begin where we left off before?’
He stared at her for a moment and then smiled, his new eye gleaming almost as brightly as the other. He reached for her hand and together they walked up to her bedroom.
Outside, the swallows were changing to bats, to measure the space of the sky with sound instead of sight. Inside, contentment had come to the house of Cyrena Lohr – all except for the bow, which seethed in its wrappings.
I have emerged into a morning that is cold for this season, in lands whose heat I can barely envisage.
I have escaped from a tunnel of years and come out from beneath a great shadow. When I look back, I expect to see a vast and endless forest, but there is only a desolate bog land, black with peat, its undulating hummocks stretching for miles before being broken by distant, ragged peaks. A night sea of wet earth laps the horizon; I cannot make out the path that I must have forged along its compacted surface. I have been standing on this rise for over an hour, attempting to recall myself and everything that must have been around me in that place, but it will not come to meet me. There is only the faintest image of another land like this, sheltering in absence at the beginning of my life, a battlefield of churned earth and oblivion, yet it will not come forward to be recognised or superimposed over this one.
My belongings tell me little. Most of them were obscure and foolish, and I have discarded them; to prove their worthlessness, I will walk over them when I leave, trampling them into the mud of this place. The only thing of any use is an obscure map on torn, stained paper, which has faded over a period of unknown time; that and a large handgun with a box of its heavy bullets. I must have been carrying it to hunt or for protection, but it is difficult to imagine any kind of creature or threat stirring in that featureless mire.
The only thing that holds me here is waiting. I feel that there should be somebody else, that they are missing, catching up with me maybe. I find myself scouring the black land below, looking for a trace of movement, for a companion making their way to here. I feel, on the periphery of my awareness, that someone will walk beside me. But nothing moves and no one comes.
I have waited and puzzled for long enough; it is time to move on and shake off the shadows.
I think the map has been made with oblique reference to the black bog below me, possibly conceived and drawn from this very vantage. It shows the vast mass as an oval, egg-shaped depression. There are noticeable scars in its interior, though some are now half-erased and swallowed up. The scars are crescent-shaped, and rotate around the edge of its interior; they look to be areas of ancient deforestation, which would explain why they are numbered, but these seem confusing and random. The largest cutting seems to have been at its centre: it is numbered ‘1’. I am using this ragged thing to gain some alignment to the new country, which is, of course, just another blank on the map. But there is a tiny arrow in the lower corner, which suggests direction of some sort.
There is nothing to lose; all ways are good. I turn the fluttering paper, marking the distant features of landscape that align with the arrow.
Without warning, the paper gives up the ghost and shreds into the wind. My last sight of it, just before it disappears and is blown from my hands into the dark mass, makes me think that it might not be a map at all. It flashes before the sun and its afterimage burns in my eyes. Its negative reveals a crude, mocking face, the countenance of one startled eye, a morbid grotesque, gawping at me. Its features are scarred; its mouth has fallen open. It glares in cartooned astonishment. I blink and it begins to fade; my lids wipe it away as the paper is blown into nothing, tattered and dissolved by the gusting air and the damp earth.
Now I know: it is time to leave this place of amnesia and illusion forever.
She clasped her hands across her belly, feeling the movement beneath; the blunt nudges and kicks, the stretching and the turns. It was difficult to walk now; there were long periods of the day when she could only rest.
Abungu was greatly swollen with the child. It had grown much in the recent months; her pregnancy could no longer be hidden. She still had far to go, so she made an asking charm, one enmeshed with all her will and love. She asked the child to be patient, to hold on and snuggle back inside her; to sleep longer, curl deeper and grow slower until they were home.
So impassioned was her asking, and so powerful was the child’s response, that its age would be held back throughout its life. Her own people would always understand this as a blessing, a sign of the power and uniqueness of the child.
The journey had taken over a year. During that time, she had started to speak: not out loud, and not in the ugly tongue of the whites who had owned her parents and so abused her, but in the language of her mother and father, the singsong words they had whispered together in that cold, filthy land. The words came through the child who nestled inside, rising up through the shared blood that looped between their brains and hearts. She spoke every day, until she was unsure who had instigated the asking charm; had it come from her or the little one? Not all things were known to her. There was a confusion about it, a fog, as there was about the old, white shaman who had put rightness in her eyes, he whom she had harvested.