‘There is no time for self-pity, William. I know of the battles you fight within yourself, but do not make the mistake of thinking you are alone in those struggles. All of us have faced loss, tragedy, despair—’
‘Not like I have,’ William whispered, ‘not like I have.’
Njinga’s temper flared up with a whoosh, like a lit match touched to a trail of gasoline; intensely mercurial in temperament, she could swing from compassionate tears to wrathful words of contempt in mere seconds.
‘Don’t for a goddamned moment think that you had it the hardest of us, William!’ she snarled, springing to her feet. ‘Don’t you dare pull that self-pityin’ bullshit on us, not now! I was snatched from my husband an’ my children three hundred an’ twenty-seven years, two hundred an’ thirty days ago by slavers! Yeah, I still remember the exact goddamned date! I saw my people thrown overboard into the ocean, chained to cannonballs! I saw men starve to death, women raped, an’ children have their limbs cut off! I was raped an’ beaten senseless countless times by the monster in Louisiana who bought me an’ chained me up as if I was nothin’ but livestock! You think you have a monopoly on suffering, you selfish asshole?! Don’t you dare bring your damned self-pity out now, don’t you fuckin’ dare!’
Lightning Bird stood up, and at once the hornet swarm of tension in the air dissipated. A cooling calm came over the room, crowding softly in like mist entering through open windows.
‘We have all suffered greatly, my friends,’ he said, clasping his long-fingered hands sagely together in front of his bony chest. ‘I do not need to tell you how it came to be that I became the last of my people, the last Chimariko who still draws breath. That in itself is a tale of immense sorrow and tragedy … but what good does it do for me to measure it against your own experience of hurt and sorry, Njinga? Or yours, Zakaria? Or yours, William? We have all been hurt, we have all witnessed great violence and suffering and sorrow, and we have all been victims of it. It will do us no good to dwell on these things. We all know this, yet still we return to them, like maddened creatures drinking from a poisoned well, fully understanding that the foul, tainted liquid we imbibe is killing us, yet lacking the will and insight to move on in search of purer waters. Fresh water, however, is the only way in which we can heal ourselves and find new strength. We cannot continue to drink from the poisoned well and expect to be healed, to strengthen our minds, bodies and spirits. No! We must instead consolidate our strengths, learn from the pain, and look to the future. That is why we four have come here today, is it not? For the future … for the hopes and dreams of the past, now reawakened, reimagined, rewrought and reanimated! Is that not why we continue to fight, why we continue to defy the most powerful group of people on this planet?’
Zakaria walked over to the shaman, placed one of his thick hands on his friend’s shoulder, and gave it a solid squeeze.
‘Yes, my friend, yes!’ he exclaimed, his voice charged with fresh optimism and a burning hope. ‘You are right! Hope! The old dreams, born anew! Carried like pennants on shining lances into the future!’
William could not shake the darkness that clung to him like moss to old stone, but he knew that for now he had to try, or to at least weave a somewhat convincing illusion that a spark of hope still flickered somewhere in the depths of his soul. He looked up and his cheeks creased into a smile.
‘You’re right, my friends … you’re right. We four, and those others who remain loyal to the old ways and the dreams that once were, we are the last hope. And I’ll be damned if I let that last remaining light fade out with a quiet whimper.’
‘It ain’t gonna be no whimper,’ Njinga declared, a dazzling light gleaming in her eyes. ‘It’s gonna be a nuclear explosion. It’s gonna be the light, sound an’ might a’ ten million atom bombs all going off at once. The Huntsmen don’t know what’s about to hit ‘em.’
‘I’ve wasted all these years in exile,’ William muttered in a low, severe tone. ‘For far too long I’ve been running, I’ve stood alone, hopeless, jaded and scared, instead of taking my rightful place here with you, my Rebel brothers and sisters.’
‘And it took a brush with to death to bring you back,’ Zakaria said, ‘but here you are. Here we are.’
William’s countenance was grim, but subtle hope glowed nonetheless in his eyes, like the promise of a sunrise against a black dawn.
‘Aye, here I am. Before we go on, though, there’s something I need to tell you all. As you know, I fought and killed Hernández back in New York. Sigurd, I believe, sent him to track me down. Before he died, he said something strange: he talked about an ancient power rising in what he called “The Dark Land”. He spoke of the Ice Bear being involved in raising some sort of dark and potent power, and it somehow ending the Great War in a way that neither we nor the Huntsmen could have foreseen. He talked of it having a devastating impact on the world of mortals as well. I don’t know what to think of all of this, but it’s made me rather concerned. What do they know that we don’t? And how has this, whatever this thingis, escaped the attention of the Huntsmen, not to mention ourselves?’
Zakaria furrowed his brow, stroked his stubbly chin and exhaled slowly through his teeth.
‘This matter is worrying, William, and it will certainly require further investigation. I’m very surprised that this has escaped both our
