Looking up from the peppery cod in his flatbread, Omar saw several men surrounding a woman in a conservative blue dress. The garment covered her from throat to wrists to ankles in the Espani fashion, but her complexion and voluminous hair style were clearly Mazigh. She was speaking just as loudly and twice as quickly as the men confronting her, but from across the cavernous cafeteria Omar couldn’t understand a word of it.
At first the angry men were all focused on the woman in blue, but then a sudden division split their ranks and several of the men seemed to switch sides, now pointing fingers and shouting at the other men. Omar heaved a weary sigh, spooned as much warm soup into his mouth as he could, and then stood up with his sandwich in hand. He stepped away from the table and started shuffling through the crowd toward the door.
The argument grew louder, and more men stood up to take sides, and the woman in blue was all but hidden by the wall of bodies.
Omar had nearly reached the door when it flew open and in rushed half a dozen young men in matching brown uniforms with long black rifles slung over their shoulders and beaming smiles on their faces. The foremost of the soldiers, a squinting fellow with a pair of scars down the left side of his face threw out his arms to the cafeteria and shouted, “Who wants to buy lunch for the hero of the Atlas Mountains?”
A handful of men waved their glasses and sandwiches at the soldiers and made some half-hearted cheers, but the shouting match in the center of the room drowned them out.
“Hey now!” The scarred soldier pushed farther into the room and gestured to the man behind him. “Three cheers for the bane of the Songhai, Lieutenant Zidane!”
The other soldiers cheered the man so loudly that Omar stepped back with a wince and one hand to his ear. The celebrated man towered over his comrades, a giant of a soldier with a shaved head and a thick neck who took in the room with half-lidded eyes and a bored frown. But this time several tables’ worth of men perked up to join in the cheer, to shout unkind words about the Songhai raiders, and to chant Zidane’s name.
In the center of the room, a fist flew and a woman cried out.
Instantly the giant called Zidane charged into the room, climbing over men and tables like a wolf racing toward his prey. He crashed into the knot of brawlers in the center of the room, roaring like a mad bull and throwing frenzied punches in every direction. The rest of the brown-clad soldiers clambered after him, but by the time they crossed the room through the crowd, the fight was already over. Half a dozen men lay sprawled on the floor and half a dozen others sat bloody and dazed on the seats nearby. The woman in blue stood untouched in the center of the space, though her expression was quite wide-eyed and she stood very, very still. Lieutenant Zidane cranked his arm around in a vicious circle to unwind his shoulder and he grunted something into his chest. Slowly, the hungry patrons put the room back together, and then the men went back to eating and talking, and Omar let go the breath he’d been holding.
Then he noticed his sandwich in his hand, and he smiled, and he shuffled out the door into the street where the air was a bit cooler and his heavy new clothes didn’t feel so oppressive. An elderly little man followed him out and exchanged an amused look with him.
“Is it always so exciting around here?” Omar asked.
The man shrugged. “Not more than once a week. But when the soldiers come around, it does tend to get colorful. That Zidane is a beast of a fellow, though. Good man, I suppose. Still, the more he’s out on the frontier, the better, eh?”
“You mean the Songhai border?”
“Where else? Songhai raiders crossed the border last summer and burned a hundred homesteads just south of Arafez. People are in a panic down that way. But the queen refuses to declare open war with the Songhai Empire, so the fighting goes nowhere, and everyone gets a bit angrier as the bodies pile up year after year.”
Omar nodded as he took another bite of his peppery fish. “Any idea what that argument was about back there? The one with the woman?”
“I don’t know. Wages, probably.” The man stretched. “Times are tough, and getting tougher. But that’s always been true, hasn’t it? Hm. Well, have a good day.” The little fellow limped away with a high, squeaking sound on every other step. Omar saw that the man’s right leg was gone just below the hip, replaced with a padded wooden cup mounted on a brass peg with a thick spring joint where his knee used to be. The stiff coil rocked and squealed with each step the man took.
It was still early in the afternoon, but Omar headed back to his hotel to shed his extra woolly layers and sit with his old Rus map. With a bit of hotel stationery and a cheap blue pen, he began his translation. After supper in the bar downstairs he considered another smoke in the alley behind the hotel, but then he thought better of it and returned to his room for an early night.
After all, tomorrow is a big day.
Chapter 4. White squall
Omar arrived in the hangar entrance just as the morning sun was about to break above the eastern ridges of the Atlas Mountains. Dressed in all of his heavy new clothes and his blue-tinted glasses, he strode toward the Frost Finch prepared to offer whatever assistance the crew required. But Captain Ngozi merely waved him into the cabin, directed him to sit in the back, and told him not to touch anything. And so he sat and waited.
From his seat, he could see the outline of the steam engine housed behind him and the shape of the flight controls in the cockpit in front of him. Along the walls to either side and lashed to the bars and shelves overhead he saw countless packages wrapped in leather and canvas, bound in twine, or covered in wooden panels. The equipment and provisions crowded in the space in teetering piles and bulbous lumps, making it more like a wildman’s cave than a civilized room.
Over the next half hour, the engineer Morayo and the two southern scholars arrived, inspected the trunks and sacks carefully stowed inside the Finch ’s cabin, and the two men sat down beside Omar with only the briefest of greetings between yawns. The cartographer Kosoko regarded him with an unpleasant frown, but kept whatever he was thinking to himself.
Morayo came back and held out a folded brown paper in her hand, on which rested a small pile of gnarled brown and white roots. She grinned at Omar. “All right landlubber, time for your medicine.”
Garai grabbed a root and popped it into his mouth. Kosoko selected one carefully and sat back with the morsel still in his hand. Omar peered at the offering. “What is it?”
“Ginger. It helps with motion sickness.”
“Oh. Thank you.” He took one of the roots and glanced at Garai, who nodded confidently between chews, so Omar put the ginger in his mouth and began chewing.
Suddenly there was a flurry of activity outside as the ground crew cranked the huge doors of the hangar open. Riuza settled into the pilot’s seat and the engine rumbled to life. Morayo sealed the cabin hatch and took her seat beside the captain. Through the small armored windows, Omar could see the Finch ’s propellers whirling just outside the gondola, their monotonous droning echoing inside the hangar.
The airship shuddered and glided forward, slowly moving out into the morning light. Omar sat patiently with his hands on his lap. He turned to Kosoko and said, “So how many times exactly have you done this?”
The cartographer pressed his lips tightly together, narrowed his eyes in a pained expression, and shook his head.
Garai, the naturalist, leaned forward and raised his voice above the noise of the engine to say, “You’ll have to excuse him. He gets more than a little motion sick, every time. It’s so bad he won’t even be able to put the ginger in his mouth for a while. But he’ll be able to talk in half an hour or so.”
“I see. And what should we do in the mean time while we’re en route?”
“Do?” The professor leaned back in his seat wedged between a small water reservoir and a cargo net full of salted fish wrapped in brown paper. “Take a nap. There’s nothing to do until we reach the glacier.”
“And how long will that take?” Omar asked.
“About two days, depending on the weather.”
The Frost Finch rose gently into the cool morning air and Omar gripped his seat as the floor vibrated and shuddered beneath him. Through the small window on his right, he saw the edge of the hangar shrinking until it fell out of sight, and then the entire city contracted into a collection of toy houses and toy shops and even toy boats on
