Coya blinked in surprise as Marsh lifted a pistol in his hand and aimed it towards the crew.
The crack of the shot went right through him. He stared in shock at his bodyguard, standing there like some duellist with his right leg extended forwards, his other hand still beneath his coat, a puff of smoke dispelling in the wind from the end of the raised gun. Coya followed the line of the shot and spotted a man toppling backwards onto the deck, while crewmen around him shouted out in surprise or dived for cover. The victim was a monk, he saw, one of the pair of monks who had come aboard to bless this august occasion of their meeting.
Another bang went off nearby, loud enough to burst his heart. Creed shouted something by his side as chunks of debris whistled past them.
A wash of black smoke blew across their position by the rail. He had time enough to see a second monk leaping towards them, something round and black in his hand, and Marsh pulling another pistol from his coat, then firing it, before the smoke engulfed them entirely; and then Coya was sprawled on the deck with a great weight pressing down on him, and another bang tried to squeeze the insides out from him.
When the smoke cleared, Marsh was still standing there with his hands now empty save for a knife. He was turning to track the monk vaulting over the rail to his death.
Coya gasped as the man vanished over the side.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Creed, patting him down before helping him to his feet.
Coya found his voice again. ‘I’m fine, I think,’ he said as he stooped awkwardly for his cane. ‘And you?’ he asked, as he leaned on it for support and looked up at the general. ‘You seem to be bleeding, on your head, there.’
Creed dabbed at his head where a shallow wound ran crimson. The general frowned then turned to look over the rail. Coya was curious too.
Below, a great distance below, a canopy of white drifted down towards the surface of the sea. As the wind carried it in the direction of the coast, he saw a man dangling beneath it, the burned orange of his robes unmistakable.
Creed shook his head in obvious fascination.
‘These Diplomats. They grow crazier every year.’
CHAPTER FOUR
The House on Tempo Street
In sweat, they lay with their lungs heaving and their cries still ringing in their ears, both of them splayed like martyrs on the sodden bed, their bodies glistening in the daylight cast through the tattered, mouldy curtains of gala lace that hung across the open window.
Bahn blinked to clear his eyes. Through the air above the bed the dust motes were dancing as though in play, whipped up by the frantic action of the last hour.
‘We make too much noise,’ she muttered next to him, but without much concern in her voice, even as a child’s yell rang up through the thin boards of the floor, and voices murmured from behind the even thinner wall at their heads.
Bahn could only gasp and wait for his galloping heart to stop racing. He was burning up, and he kicked away the thin blanket that had snared itself around his ankles. He wiped his stubbled face dry, and realized that he’d forgotten to shave that morning.
The room was a cupboard-like space with a triangular, slope-beamed ceiling too low for a man to stand properly beneath. It reeked of dampness, sex, and the spiced smoke from an incense burner sitting beneath the open window. A perch, they called this kind of attic room in Bar-Khos; the preserve of prostitutes and street hustlers, or those in hiding from the law.
Bahn looked down at the girl as she rolled against his side and rested an arm across his stomach, her white skin as smooth as paper. Like her face, her small breasts were flushed, and he lay there and enjoyed the sensation of them flattening against his chest while the soft lilt of her voice played in his ears. ‘Or rather, you make too much noise,’ she was saying in her Lagosian accent, and she slid her hand downwards past his stomach, and stroked his downy hair with painted nails.
‘You were hardly quiet yourself,’ he breathed, and felt his scrotum tighten as her nails explored him further – sweet Mercy, he was responding again already. He could not get enough of this girl.
Absently, Bahn wondered if a shade had possessed him these past days and weeks; one of those spirits of mad impulse that seized hold of lives and spurred them headlong into tragedy with their insatiable needs.
If only I believed in such things, Bahn considered in his usual rational way. He knew that this weakness was his alone to carry. He thought of Marlee, his wife, and felt the usual first flutters of guilt in his stomach, a nausea he would carry with him for the rest of the day. He sighed heavily.
The girl beside him knew that sound by now, and she drew her hand away to leave him in peace. She cradled her head against the nook of his shoulder, her blue eyes fixed on the low sloping beams of the ceiling above them. He observed the spikes of her honey-coloured hair as they bristled against his skin.
‘I hardly recognized you, when I first came in,’ he told her.
She looked up with those eyes that he still found so mesmerizing.
‘Your hair,’ he explained, nodding to the ridge of erect hair that ran along the middle of her scalp, like the mating display of some jungle bird. He could smell it, the wax that coated it and made it stiff like that. ‘It makes you look like one of those travelling tuchoni.’
‘You don’t like it? Meqa did it for me. She’s half tuchoni herself, or so she tells it.’
‘I like it well enough. It’s certainly… exotic.’ Yet Bahn couldn’t help but think of the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her, standing on a corner with the other street girls of the Quarter of Barbers, in a thin rain that had plastered her short hair in curls around her head. ‘I just thought it suited your name, the way that it was.’
‘I still have my curls,’ she purred, twisting one with a finger, blinking up at him through her lashes.
‘Enough now,’ he urged.
‘What?’
He said nothing for a few moments. ‘Let’s just lie here a while. Two people in a room together. I’ll still pay for your time.’
She smiled, and it was the first genuine smile she had ever offered him. ‘I can do that.’
The girl lay back against his arm. She pursed her lips and blew at a shining dust mote to push it away from her face. Her eyes followed it and Bahn found himself doing the same, tracking its motion through the cloud of swirling specks that filled the room.
The mote drifted over a stack of folded clothing pressed between the bed and the wall. At last it vanished amongst the leaves of a jubba plant in a chipped wooden bowl, where a single blue flower was in late bloom. A Lagosian thing that, to pot plants and bring them indoors, a fashion that had been catching on in the city since the steady influx of refugees from Lagos had first begun; Marlee had even started doing it.
Outside, a crow flapped past the window, making its ugly calls. For long moments Bahn simply gazed through the curtains of lace, staring at the meagre view of housing tenements under construction on the other side of the yards and communal vegetable plots, the cranes and scaffolding poking up beneath a slab of azure sky. The voice sounded again through the sheet-thin wall behind them; Meqa, bartering with a customer over her price. From below, the sounds of the children continued to rise from the ground floor.
They were a tribe, those fifteen children, and they were ruled only by their mother Rosa, the landlady of the house, who as it turned out was not their mother at all, save for two of them; rather, she was a middle-aged widow with a good heart, who could not help but take in every stray hungry child that she encountered. The children themselves barely seemed to notice the men who clambered up the creaking stairs at the rear of the house at all hours. Bahn, on his handful of recent visits here, had been ignored by them after only a few glances his way – the children too busy shrieking around in the muck of the backyard, fighting over worms and yelling in delight each time they snapped one in half.
It was enough to make Bahn think of his own son and infant daughter, though he chased those thoughts away, quickly, before they could gain any substance.
‘It’s quiet,’ the girl said.
