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  “I wish to speak real English,” he said in his slow, childish voice. “I will speak the way Sister Mary speaks, and Sister Mercy, and Dr. Jones.”

  “Then you becoming just only black Englishman,” Kashka said. “When I speaking English, I be making it for me. African.”

  “I be speaking both way,” Paul said.

  “I will speak it both ways,” Francis corrected him.

  “All you Naga wanting be black Englishmen,” Kashka said.

  “I be Nagala, not Naga,” Paul said.

  Kashka snorted his scorn. Jilli yawned. She was always trying to tune around for rock programs. Paul didn’t enjoy arguing with Kashka about politics, because Kashka had all his ideas fixed and set, and wouldn’t even listen to anyone else’s arguments, so he changed the subject. Jilli’s grandmother had come around to the platform that morning and was sitting with them working at her endless task of teasing the fibres out of lengths of dried reed so that Jilli’s mother and aunts could weave them into mats.

  “Don’t she hear you not speaking Fulu?” Paul said. “Don’t she go tell you father you learning English?”

  Jilli reached up and caressed the old woman’s cheek with her long fingers.

  “She too much friend for me,” she said.

  She twittered a snatch of Fulu, and the grandmother raised her creased, sunken-cheeked face and answered, proud as a leopard.

  “Mans stupid, she saying,” said Jilli.

  “Men are stupid,” said Francis automatically. Jilli ignored him. Because they usually spoke Naga she was learning that faster than English, but even in English she was much more confident than Paul had been, shoving the words together any way that suited her and using her spidery hands and mobile face to put the meaning across.

  “Mans all stupid,” she said. “She father, me father, all stupid. Long back she father giving she to stupid man. Now me father doing same. Womans be like buffalo, like basket, uh? She saying no. I saying no. She telling me for to go to Dangoum.”

  She jumped up as if she was ready to set out that instant, but only swarmed down the ladder to the boats below and brought up a bundle of fresh-cut reeds, which she spread against the wall of the house to dry. When Paul tried to help her she slapped his hand away.

  “Woman work,” she said.

  “Women’s work,” said Francis.

  This time Jilli repeated the words correctly, teasing him by copying his voice. She could if she wanted. When they let her retune the radio she copied the disc jockeys.

  Twice Jilli took them out into the marshes with messages for her brothers. Like everything else in Fulu the boats were made of reeds, lashed in tight bundles and shaped like stubby canoes. They sat low in the water and were heavy to paddle. The four of them knelt two a side, driving the boat forward, chanting to keep time with their strokes. One of the boats had an outboard motor, but Jilli was never allowed to use it.

  Language mornings apart, the school at Tsheba stayed very like the one back at base camp. They were still in tents. The workmen building the new school sometimes didn’t turn up for days on end, or when they did they sat around waiting for materials to be delivered. Paul found the work difficult. It didn’t take him long to find out that it wasn’t only Francis who was cleverer than he was—practically everyone else was too. They had been picked to go to Tsheba for their brains. But it wasn’t just that that set him apart. Though many of the others were orphans, or the children of parents who’d fled for their lives from their villages when the soldiers had come burning and murdering and looting, almost all of them had found their way to refugee camps over one of the borders, where they’d been able to wait till the war was over. Paul and Francis and Kashka were exceptions in their class, because they’d actually fought in the war, lived the life of a Warrior, known that kind of tension, that kind of horror and triumph. It set them apart. Though there were Nagai in the class whom Paul did make friends with, he still found himself easiest in Kashka’s company, despite Kashka’s arrogance. Kashka seemed to feel the same, though he would never have admitted it, perhaps not even to himself. They were the ones who understood what it had been like. Francis didn’t count. He was too young.

  In a way, though Paul had nowhere which he could think of as home, he was homesick. Homesick for the war. He begged a big map of Nagala off Sister Mercy and spent hours trying to work out and mark on it the movements of Michael’s commando. There were expeditions of which he felt he could recall every march, every camp site. Sometimes the places were named on the map, or at least marked, a bridge they’d mined, a garrisoned town they’d needed to bypass, a watering place where he’d gone alone and naked to count the government trucks and listen for news. Using these and his memories he found that there were areas he’d crossed and re-crossed, so that now if you’d dropped him there by parachute in the dark he could have waited for dawn and looked around and known where he was.

  He showed Michael the map when he came up to collect Paul for the Independence Day holidays. Michael laughed but shook his head.

  “That’s all over,” he said. “When we’ve got the present and future shaped up there’ll be time for the past.”

  “The war was my mother,” said Paul. “I’m laying her to rest.”

  This time Michael had checked his laugh and studied the map, tracing the journeys route by route with his forefinger.

  “Pretty good,” he said. “Don’t think I could have done that. Something wrong here—the ’eighty-seven rains we were in Shidi—that’s where Papp came to us. His tribal grounds are over here, either side of the railway just beyond where it turns south. I thought we might fly out there next week and see how he’s getting on, and photograph a bit of wildlife.”

  “That would be great.”

  “I’ve managed to clear four days. I was hoping for more, but we’ve got the heads of the Organization of African Unity coming to Dangoum the month after next, and that means a load of extra work for me. I’m afraid you’re going to be pretty much on your own in Dangoum till we get away.”

  “I shan’t mind.”

  “Wait and see.”

  They drove off in a long black Mercedes with polarized windows, like sunglasses, so that you could see out but not in. The doors closed with a heavy clunk, like the breach of a field gun.

  “Bullet-proof,” said Michael. “The floor’s armoured, too, in case of mines. It’s one of Boyo’s toys—we found five of them in the palace.”

  While he read papers from his briefcase Paul played with the switches and fittings, the bar with its silver goblets, the air-conditioner, the TV with no signals to receive, the gun compartment. The car swished westward along a smooth new road which da Yabin’s government had built as a showpiece, with the Strip and the marshes on their right. After more than an hour they turned south. Soldiers manned a roadblock on the causeway over the tongue of marsh where the Djunga funnelled in, but they waved the Mercedes through. On either side of the roadblock the ordinary travellers waited, a few old trucks, oxen with panniers, farmers and traders with shoulder loads, and so on. They stared dully at the long black government car. Michael looked up from his work and sighed.

  “I never imagined this,” he said. “How much do you think the soldiers are demanding to let them through? As far as these people can see we are just a continuation of the old oppression, with new initials.”

  “Can’t you stop the soldiers taking bribes?”

  “How? Who will give the orders? Their captain is lining his pockets, and so is his colonel, and so is their general. Do you know what our minister of commerce gave his son for his eighteenth birthday? A private helicopter.”

  “Wow!”

  “One of the many things I’ve learned is that governments have extraordinarily little power to make people happy, though they have plenty of power to make them miserable. The people must will their own happiness, the means as well
as the end. Nothing else is any use.”

  “It’ll be all right one day.”

  “May you live to see it.”

  The miles wore on. There was another roadblock at the bridge over the Tan and two more before Dangoum. They drove through bush, between dry eroded hills, past villages with their patches of brown gardens around them. It was nearly dusk when the road entered an endless, pale, dusty plain, almost pure desert. The setting sun wobbled and stretched in the waves of heated air that rose from its barren reaches.

  “Dangoum Flats,” said Michael. “Take a good long look. This is why we had to come to terms with the NDR, whatever the hotheads said. Dangoum’s a fortress because of the Flats. They’re better than trenches and minefields. Give the government in Dangoum a few airplanes, a few tanks and armoured cars, and they can hold out against commandos as long as the water in the aquifer holds out, and that means for ever.”

  “You said people were still getting across to join the shanties.”

  “Mostly in trucks, bribing their way past the road-blocks. Some of them on the railway. Quite a few on foot—there’s guides who bring them through, walking at night, though there’s some never make it.”

  “They’re that desperate to get through?”

  “They think they are, but when they get there…You’d better see for yourself. I’ll get Peter to take you into the shanties. The only other things worth seeing in Dangoum are Boyo’s palace and the market.”

  “Who’s Peter?”

  “Cooks and cleans my apartment.”

  “I could do that.”

  “Not your job any more.”

  Michael returned to his papers. Paul sat silent, watching the sun sink over the dreadful desert. He was cross with himself for feeling jealous that somebody else should be looking after Michael. He’d much rather have been doing that than going back to school in nine days’ time.

  3

  Dangoum was a glow in the dark ahead. Then it was a smell, a sour mixed reek of fumes and dung and rotting food. Then it was a wide double road lined on either side with palms, the grey trunks blip-blip-blipping past in the headlights, with scattered vague lights beyond. Then there were dim wide-spaced street-lights with two- and three-story flat-roofed buildings behind the palms, their walls plastered with peeling posters, and food stalls lit by glaring butane lamps, and the blare and flicker of a disco. Then tall glass-faced buildings and lit shop windows and neon signs. And then at the very top of the avenue, so different that it made Paul’s mouth open in a silent gasp, the palace Boyo had built, a long, white floodlit building with a tower at the centre standing on a low mound, with fountains playing and a ring of water below reflecting the gleam and glitter above.

  “Wow!” said Paul.

  “American architect,” said Michael. “Apart from the water tower it’s a copy of some palace in Europe. The fountains look like a waste, but water’s the one thing Dangoum’s got plenty of. The floodlighting is a waste, but we run it for a couple of hours each evening as a way of telling everyone that the war’s really over.”

  “Is it?”

  “Ask me in ten weeks’ time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Michael shook his head.

  The car half circled the palace, turned down another wide avenue, and drew up in front of one of the tall buildings. There was a soldier on guard who saluted Michael, and a porter who came to carry Paul’s case. They rode an elevator up.

  “Strange feeling, uh?” said Michael.

  Paul nodded, determined not to show his sense of wonder. An elevator, he told himself, was no more amazing than his AK had been, once you understood it. Just a machine for doing a job.

  “When you say your prayers ask for there not to be power cuts. A hundred and thirty-six stairs to climb. Makes a change from Tsheba. I’ll show you how the toilet works, and then we’ll see what Peter’s giving us for supper.”

  The windows of the apartment looked eastward. A hundred miles away in the clear morning air Paul could see the blue Baroba hills, beyond the pale Flats and the browner bush. Inside the Flats was a ring of green, fields and gardens irrigated from the aquifer to feed Dangoum, and inside that the fuzz of the shanties, and then, almost at his feet, it seemed, the pattern of the rectangular roofs of the old town, bright-speckled with awnings for people to sleep under during the hot nights and the still hotter noons.

  Michael had gone to work before Paul was up, but had left a map of the city and a note saying “Go and see Boyo’s palace this morning. I’ll be back about twelve.” The map showed that Dangoum had been planned (by the British, Paul learned later) as a series of rings around the central mound on which the palace now stood. Twelve wide roads radiated from there, linked to each other at intervals by smaller circling roads. The plan had never been completed and the pattern kept breaking down, but most of the main avenues ran true toward the weird white building at the centre. Paul went up there after breakfast.

  The palace was now being run as a tourist attraction, but there were no tourists apart from Paul and a Danish woman journalist who took a lot of photographs and asked even more questions. The guide, a pale-skinned, tall thin woman, just smiled and went on with her spiel. She showed them Boyo’s state bed, and his fifty-two uniforms, and the shelf after shelf of clockwork toys he’d collected, and the cupboard after cupboard of Paris clothes he’d imported for his wives, and the banqueting hall with the sandbagged section opposite Boyo’s chair, so that after dinner he could loll and sip his brandy and see how close he could shoot to one of the prisoners brought up from the cells below. The guide smiled about this too. Paul thought she must be Fulu. She spoke good English, but there was a sort of twitter behind it, just like Jilli’s. She was still smiling when she took the visitors down to the pumping hall.

  This was a wide, dim tunnel running beneath the palace and filled with a steady pulsing, like a double heartbeat. All down the centre water ran in a rushing channel until it reached a black pool, on either side of which the brass pistons of the pumps rose and fell. These weren’t the main pumps, the guide explained. These only forced the water from the pool up into a huge tank at the top of the tower, from which it then flowed out to feed Dangoum. The pumps that brought the water up from the aquifer itself were another sixty meters underground. The pumping hail and the water tower had been built by the British, and Boyo had added the rest of his palace around them.

  When the guide had finished explaining this she led them to the other end of the tunnel, where the space on either side of the rushing stream had been narrowed to a walkway, with a series of barred doors facing each other across the gap.

  “These, too, Boyo had built,” said the guide. “They were for his special prisoners. Listen.”

  She clicked a switch and a tape started to play, a man’s voice explaining how he’d been brought to the pumping hall, and what had been done to him by the guards while he was there, but he’d barely begun on the real horrors when the lights went out and the tape moaned into silence.

  “Only a power cut,” said the guide’s bubbling voice. “Please stay still, in case you fall in the water. The power will soon be restored. The palace has its own generators.”

  They stood in the haunted dark, listening to the thud of the pumps and the whisper of the stream. Paul tried to imagine what had happened in this place. It was as bad as anything he’d seen in the war. Worse.

  A cigarette lighter snapped and the Danish woman’s face showed beaky and pale in its glow. She lit cigarettes for herself and the guide.

  “And the cells haven’t been used since Boyo’s time?” she asked.

  “It was all closed. The exhibition was not completed.”

  “For five years? According to Amnesty International Colonel Chichaka …

  “The case of Colonel Chichaka is sub judice. Look, here are the lights.”

  The lamps barely shone,
dim yellow between the cells. There wasn’t enough power to drive the tape so the guide switched it off and led the way out, talking as she did so—things she’d already said—to stop the Danish woman asking any more about Amnesty. They came up into daylight at the other end of the palace, in the Hall of the Future, which turned out to be an unfinished exhibition of what the Malani government was going to do for Nagala, with model peasants digging model wells and raising model crops in model fields and working a model cotton mill. The model game reserve was still being built. New though it all was, the future smelled dull and dusty.

  Paul found Michael already in the apartment, reading yet more papers and making notes in the margins. Lunch was brought in by Peter, a wrinkled, grinning man barely taller than Paul. It was maize salad and a little salt beef, nothing special.

  “Nowadays Africans all want bread,” said Michael. “You can’t grow wheat here and you can’t make bread from maize, so you have to buy it in from Europe or America. If there isn’t bread, there’ll be riots. What did you make of the palace?”

  “Was he mad?”

  Michael shrugged.

  “Is it mad to want power?” he said. “Then I am mad too. Almost all men want power. I don’t know about women. But if you have power you need to express it, or it ceases to be power. You do this by conquering more and more nations to add to your power, or by building a useless city in the middle of a desert, or by persuading your people to live in peace and happiness, or by shooting a line of bullet holes around a terrified prisoner. In the old days there were kings who ate men’s hearts because they believed it added to the power of their own souls. Really it’s all the same.”

  “And Chichaka used the cells too?”

  “Sometimes. It depended how his power struggle with da Yabin was going.”